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>Engineers’ effectiveness, on the other hand, is hard to measure. We don’t even really know what makes people productive; thus we talk about 10x engineers as th

>Engineers’ effectiveness, on the other hand, is hard to measure. We don’t even really know what makes people productive; thus we talk about 10x engineers as though that’s a thing when even the studies that lead to the notion of a 10x engineer pointed more strongly to the notion of a 10x office. Management has a vested interest in pushing the meme that there are no 10xers: it gives them an excuse for not paying these engineers what they're actually worth. The rest of us just go along with it because it assuages the inadequacy we naturally feel when we compare ourselves with someone like Linus Torvalds or John Carmack. Clearly there are 10xers, and some of them even post here: Walter Bright, Bryan Cantrill, and Ted Unangst. Edit: I'm also not surprised Seibel would say something like this given his past demonstration of lacking social awareness by titling his book of programmer interviews "Coders at Work"--a title that one of his interviewees, L. Peter Deutsch, rightly objected to, much to Seibel's shock. Deutsch in 1984 co-authored the seminal paper on building efficient virtual machines for dynamic languages through just-in-time compilation and inline caching, techniques which ultimately gave rise to the JVM. He deserves an immense amount of respect for this and other accomplishments, and we do him and our profession a great disservice by publicly referring to him as a "coder" or anything else that elicits something less than awe from the general public. Could you imagine doctors referring to some highly-regarded brain surgeon as a "cutter" or "butcher?" No, instead they talk them up as "brilliant" or even god-like, yet we do the equivalent with "coder" (and allow the media to do it too) all the time.

stdbrouw 11y ago
Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman were 10x physicists. Then there are probably a couple more 9x physicists, many of them with Nobel prizes under their belt. A lot more 5x physicists. A whole mass of 2x physicists. Another whole mass of 0.5x physicists. I don't think anyone wants to seriously dispute that there's a bell curve of aptitude in pretty much any human endeavor, whether that aptitude came naturally or was nurtured due to hard work or both. But the 10x gospel we see in software engineering is an entirely different beast: the claim is that there's a small group of people who "really get it" and that everyone else "just isn't made of the right stuff". It assumes both a kind of determinism (you do not become good, you either are good or you're not) and a hard dichotomy (there's no ordinary engineers, just bad ones and great ones). Of course management would prefer to make ordinary engineers better than to let a couple of brilliant minds work their magic. But that's just common sense: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Men https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Me...
- hitekker 11y ago
  Totally agree. One thing I've noticed: the people who talk about 10x engineers almost uniformly believe they're either apart of that elite cadre, somewhat close to it, or will one day ascend to its ranks. I believe that there are nodes in a network which have greater inherent value than other nodes, but can only achieve 10x value when working with other nodes of similar caliber in the context of the problem they are solving.
onewaystreet 11y ago
Who in management do you see pushing the meme that there are no 10xers? It's management who is responsible for that meme. It's designed to get people to work 80 hour weeks, to shun work/life balance.
- not-a-10xer 11y ago
  The 10xer isn't a 10xer because they work 80-hour weeks but because they produce relatively more output of a relatively higher quality in a given time frame, by as much as an order of magnitude, or at least that's how I understand it. For example, Linus Torvalds wrote git in a month and in the process effectively dug the grave of svn, a project into which thousands of man-hours had already been sunk. The "10xers don't exist" meme supports the notion that programmers are interchangeable cogs and justifies the ~$130k salary ceiling we run into without going into management.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    I think you're mistaking how easy it is to write a program from scratch when you have nothing in your way (once you have some experience, before that writing a program from scratch is really hard). Maintenance becomes ever more complicated and hard as time goes on because the complexity of the bugs goes up by orders of magnitude as does the complexity of the code. I've spent more time adding a very minor bit of functionality to a system I wrote 5 years ago than I did writing the whole thing in the first place. Because it grows and adding new code or modifying existing code becomes more and more expensive. How many man-hours have gone in to git now? And it's not as if git is that great anyway, we all know how bad the UX is for example and all the man hours that have gone in to masking that problem, it's just better than SVN.
    - jules 11y ago
      Linus could have chosen to work on improving SVN instead, but he did not. The decision to write a new version control system in the first place is part of what makes makes him so much more effective, not just pure programming ability.
deanCommie 11y ago
There are certainly 10xers. But how many 1xers are you willing to piss off to keep one of them happy? 10? Maybe you're breaking even, maybe you're even still ahead. 20? Starting to become more of a problem. Torvalds and Carmack is an interesting twosome to start with because from where I'm sitting, having never met either of them, Carmack is a dream engineer from every angle - and coworkers alike. If I worked with him and found out he made 10x my salary and got 10x the leeway I'd shrug, nod, and say well yeah, of course. On the other hand, if I worked with Torvalds at a company that wasn't his encompassing baby, I think I would quit in a year as would many others. He can only get away with the shit he pulls because he is a singular genius. But most people who act like him are not, yet because some managers think they're 5x or 10x or whatever, they get indulged and coddled. I've worked with enough assholes that I'll take a couple less productive human beings over a ninja-pirate-superstar prick.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  The best 10xers are the ones that make the surrounding 5 people into 2xers.
nfc 11y ago
Just an observation. There are perhaps 10xers in 'software development productivity' but a company should pay based on a different metric, 'business value productivity'. There is nothing saying that a 100% increase in software productivity will cause a 100% increase in business value. Sometimes the relationship will be 1/1 sometimes 1/10 but sometimes 1/0.1 or even. 1/-x. It depends on so many things (how clear and adequate the goals are, the state of development, the context of the business).
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Managers are supposed to get all that money in exchange of making sure that relationship is always near 1/1.
gadders 11y ago
If there are true 10x-ers, they'd be pretty rare, right? Like the chances of being one would be on a par with playing in the NFL.
- tim333 11y ago
  It guess but it depends a bit on how you define 10x. If you do it by business value added by some programming it could be as simple as someone saying don't do that do this at the right point.
gull 11y ago
> even the studies that lead to the notion of a 10x engineer pointed more strongly to the notion of a 10x office Does anyone have a citation for this?
- josephg 11y ago
  I heard that result from reading Peopleware, although this (apparently well researched) Stackexchange answer disagrees: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good-programmer-can-be-as-10x-times-more-productive-than-a-mediocre-one http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...
  - leoc 11y ago
    This one right? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good-programmer-can-be-as-10x-times-more-productive-than-a-mediocre-one/181297#181297 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...
pjc50 11y ago
One of these days I'm going to have to write an essay on my experiences as and among very smart people, and my experience of burnout. Although it's the sort of subject that attracts controversy and people saying that their personal experience overrules your personal experience. Provisional title: "I used to be a 10x programmer like you, until I took an arrow to the knee" (also, there are multiple different types of 10x programmer who are not necessarily cross-substitutable)
SZJX 11y ago
Such a claim really reeks of elitism and predeterminism. Everybody has similar inherent capacities as long as you're not born with some serious disorder. it's just that some people work harder, plan better and are more obsessed with certain ("success" or fame for example) that others don't necessarily do etc., so they appear to be more efficient at certain things. Even then still they're just maybe 50% better than other coworkers. "10x" is a ridiculously huge number and of course if you compare top programmers with college freshmen then maybe you'll get this amount but if such a discrepancy exists in a professional company then probably it hired some extremely shitty programmer and the management should thoroughly reflect upon what went wrong. That'd be the only explanation. It's like if in a professional soccer club's first team the best player is literally "10x" better than the average players then the club must have some serious issues and the top player won't stay for long anyways before he goes off to a team that makes more sense.

stdbrouw 11y ago

Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman were 10x physicists. Then there are probably a couple more 9x physicists, many of them with Nobel prizes under their belt. A lot more 5x physicists. A whole mass of 2x physicists. Another whole mass of 0.5x physicists. I don't think anyone wants to seriously dispute that there's a bell curve of aptitude in pretty much any human endeavor, whether that aptitude came naturally or was nurtured due to hard work or both. But the 10x gospel we see in software engineering is an entirely different beast: the claim is that there's a small group of people who "really get it" and that everyone else "just isn't made of the right stuff". It assumes both a kind of determinism (you do not become good, you either are good or you're not) and a hard dichotomy (there's no ordinary engineers, just bad ones and great ones). Of course management would prefer to make ordinary engineers better than to let a couple of brilliant minds work their magic. But that's just common sense: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Men https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Me...

hitekker 11y ago
Totally agree. One thing I've noticed: the people who talk about 10x engineers almost uniformly believe they're either apart of that elite cadre, somewhat close to it, or will one day ascend to its ranks. I believe that there are nodes in a network which have greater inherent value than other nodes, but can only achieve 10x value when working with other nodes of similar caliber in the context of the problem they are solving.

onewaystreet 11y ago

Who in management do you see pushing the meme that there are no 10xers? It's management who is responsible for that meme. It's designed to get people to work 80 hour weeks, to shun work/life balance.

not-a-10xer 11y ago
The 10xer isn't a 10xer because they work 80-hour weeks but because they produce relatively more output of a relatively higher quality in a given time frame, by as much as an order of magnitude, or at least that's how I understand it. For example, Linus Torvalds wrote git in a month and in the process effectively dug the grave of svn, a project into which thousands of man-hours had already been sunk. The "10xers don't exist" meme supports the notion that programmers are interchangeable cogs and justifies the ~$130k salary ceiling we run into without going into management.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  I think you're mistaking how easy it is to write a program from scratch when you have nothing in your way (once you have some experience, before that writing a program from scratch is really hard). Maintenance becomes ever more complicated and hard as time goes on because the complexity of the bugs goes up by orders of magnitude as does the complexity of the code. I've spent more time adding a very minor bit of functionality to a system I wrote 5 years ago than I did writing the whole thing in the first place. Because it grows and adding new code or modifying existing code becomes more and more expensive. How many man-hours have gone in to git now? And it's not as if git is that great anyway, we all know how bad the UX is for example and all the man hours that have gone in to masking that problem, it's just better than SVN.
  - jules 11y ago
    Linus could have chosen to work on improving SVN instead, but he did not. The decision to write a new version control system in the first place is part of what makes makes him so much more effective, not just pure programming ability.

deanCommie 11y ago

There are certainly 10xers. But how many 1xers are you willing to piss off to keep one of them happy? 10? Maybe you're breaking even, maybe you're even still ahead. 20? Starting to become more of a problem. Torvalds and Carmack is an interesting twosome to start with because from where I'm sitting, having never met either of them, Carmack is a dream engineer from every angle - and coworkers alike. If I worked with him and found out he made 10x my salary and got 10x the leeway I'd shrug, nod, and say well yeah, of course. On the other hand, if I worked with Torvalds at a company that wasn't his encompassing baby, I think I would quit in a year as would many others. He can only get away with the shit he pulls because he is a singular genius. But most people who act like him are not, yet because some managers think they're 5x or 10x or whatever, they get indulged and coddled. I've worked with enough assholes that I'll take a couple less productive human beings over a ninja-pirate-superstar prick.

mikekchar 11y ago
The best 10xers are the ones that make the surrounding 5 people into 2xers.

nfc 11y ago

Just an observation. There are perhaps 10xers in 'software development productivity' but a company should pay based on a different metric, 'business value productivity'. There is nothing saying that a 100% increase in software productivity will cause a 100% increase in business value. Sometimes the relationship will be 1/1 sometimes 1/10 but sometimes 1/0.1 or even. 1/-x. It depends on so many things (how clear and adequate the goals are, the state of development, the context of the business).

marcosdumay 11y ago
Managers are supposed to get all that money in exchange of making sure that relationship is always near 1/1.

gadders 11y ago

If there are true 10x-ers, they'd be pretty rare, right? Like the chances of being one would be on a par with playing in the NFL.

tim333 11y ago
It guess but it depends a bit on how you define 10x. If you do it by business value added by some programming it could be as simple as someone saying don't do that do this at the right point.

gull 11y ago

> even the studies that lead to the notion of a 10x engineer pointed more strongly to the notion of a 10x office Does anyone have a citation for this?

josephg 11y ago
I heard that result from reading Peopleware, although this (apparently well researched) Stackexchange answer disagrees: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good-programmer-can-be-as-10x-times-more-productive-than-a-mediocre-one http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...
- leoc 11y ago
  This one right? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good-programmer-can-be-as-10x-times-more-productive-than-a-mediocre-one/181297#181297 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...

pjc50 11y ago

One of these days I'm going to have to write an essay on my experiences as and among very smart people, and my experience of burnout. Although it's the sort of subject that attracts controversy and people saying that their personal experience overrules your personal experience. Provisional title: "I used to be a 10x programmer like you, until I took an arrow to the knee" (also, there are multiple different types of 10x programmer who are not necessarily cross-substitutable)

SZJX 11y ago

Such a claim really reeks of elitism and predeterminism. Everybody has similar inherent capacities as long as you're not born with some serious disorder. it's just that some people work harder, plan better and are more obsessed with certain ("success" or fame for example) that others don't necessarily do etc., so they appear to be more efficient at certain things. Even then still they're just maybe 50% better than other coworkers. "10x" is a ridiculously huge number and of course if you compare top programmers with college freshmen then maybe you'll get this amount but if such a discrepancy exists in a professional company then probably it hired some extremely shitty programmer and the management should thoroughly reflect upon what went wrong. That'd be the only explanation. It's like if in a professional soccer club's first team the best player is literally "10x" better than the average players then the club must have some serious issues and the top player won't stay for long anyways before he goes off to a team that makes more sense.