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> The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more efficient. Someone can be a 10x engineer if they do nothing for 364 days then convi

> The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more efficient. Someone can be a 10x engineer if they do nothing for 364 days then convinces the team to change programming language to a 2x more productive language. Seriously?

rewqfdsa 11y ago
The article goes on to suggest that there are "1000x" engineers who can do things other engineers cannot do. The article intentionally obfuscates the point to try to disguise the idea that talent really does vary tremendously and that no amount of teamwork can match rare insight. It's become politically fashionable to discount the contributions of individuals, because if we think about differences in talent and follow the implications, we're led to crimethink. There was even an article on HN a little while ago suggesting Einstein didn't really do anything important and that his discoveries were just a product of his time.
- FLUX-YOU 11y ago
  >The article goes on to suggest that there are "1000x" engineers who can do things other engineers cannot do. It's a very easy statement to make but really hard to prove. I will probably never write a solid OS kernel, but I'm also not going to spend 5 years trying to learn all of the concepts and hard-won knowledge just to prove that I can when I really don't want to be doing it in the first place. Especially when you can back out of that original argument by saying "Oh, well you were 10x, you just didn't know it". I also haven't read too much about career progression for engineers which plays into all of this, i.e., what percentage of 10x should I be after 6 months? 1 year? 5? 10? What skills should I possess on that career timeline? The answer right now is pretty much open-ended.
xiaoma 11y ago
Yeah and Jeff Atwood is a 1000000x engineer because he wrote some blog posts that made other programmers more productive and then built Stack Overflow and made even more programmers more productive.

rewqfdsa 11y ago

The article goes on to suggest that there are "1000x" engineers who can do things other engineers cannot do. The article intentionally obfuscates the point to try to disguise the idea that talent really does vary tremendously and that no amount of teamwork can match rare insight. It's become politically fashionable to discount the contributions of individuals, because if we think about differences in talent and follow the implications, we're led to crimethink. There was even an article on HN a little while ago suggesting Einstein didn't really do anything important and that his discoveries were just a product of his time.

FLUX-YOU 11y ago
>The article goes on to suggest that there are "1000x" engineers who can do things other engineers cannot do. It's a very easy statement to make but really hard to prove. I will probably never write a solid OS kernel, but I'm also not going to spend 5 years trying to learn all of the concepts and hard-won knowledge just to prove that I can when I really don't want to be doing it in the first place. Especially when you can back out of that original argument by saying "Oh, well you were 10x, you just didn't know it". I also haven't read too much about career progression for engineers which plays into all of this, i.e., what percentage of 10x should I be after 6 months? 1 year? 5? 10? What skills should I possess on that career timeline? The answer right now is pretty much open-ended.

xiaoma 11y ago

Yeah and Jeff Atwood is a 1000000x engineer because he wrote some blog posts that made other programmers more productive and then built Stack Overflow and made even more programmers more productive.