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It's widely accepted that olympic swimmers are more talented a person you'd randomly find at your community pool, but for some reason there's strong resistance

It's widely accepted that olympic swimmers are more talented a person you'd randomly find at your community pool, but for some reason there's strong resistance to the idea that across a large distribution of software engineers, some outliers may indeed be much more productive than the mean.

louhike 7y ago
I don't think it's fair to compare random people in a community pool (even though some can be really good) with engineers with work experience.
ceejayoz 7y ago
Is Michael Phelps ten times faster than your average competitive swimmer, though?
- Wald76 7y ago
  No but he wins 10 times more often.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    A software development team probably shouldn't be a "one person wins, everyone else loses" scenario, though.
    - chrisan 7y ago
      well to simplify it: if 2 competing companies with 1 programmer each were trying to create $popular_app_or_website then the company with the more productive developer would "win" more often
      - onefuncman 7y ago
        no, businesses win or lose based on sales & marketing, not how productive their engineers are.
    - tonyarkles 7y ago
      The ideal "10x engineer" in my mind is one that helps their team win significantly more often. Competitive swimming is maybe not the best analogy (although I have worked with engineers like that before too). If you want sports, maybe basketball. You've got a good team, but you've got a stellar player that makes them all better.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bluedino 7y ago
  Switch Michael Phelps with Tom Brady.
- zip1234 7y ago
  Does Michael Phelps deliver 10x more value than the slowest guy on the US team? The multiplier is for value to the organization.
jimbokun 7y ago
Of course there are far more productive engineers, but this man, while good at his job, and the description of a "10x" engineer in the cited twitter thread, are nothing like actual 10x engineers. The ultimate "10x" engineer, to me, is Peter Norvig. (Maybe a 100x engineer?) For fun, he knocks out a spell checker on a plane ride: https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html In very concise, well documented, easy to read and understand code, with good performance. This isn't because Peter doesn't have to look at documentation or has a black desktop background. It's because he can look at a problem and come up with elegant and creative solutions other engineers wouldn't even think of.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y ago
  Thank you for explaining so succinctly what a 10x engineer is. In fact, that's a 10x for many professions that lend to high creativity and experience. This out of the way reply to a comment on a post that's a reply to a twitter storm. This here, this is a major issue I have with 'news'. We are many times busy discussing crap, which is well defined and easy to understand. But the mundane, easy explanation fails to be bait worthy. Instead what gets picked up is the most extreme, strident and far out explanations. And these seem to dominate public commentary. jimbokun summarized what a 10x engineer is, in an off hand comment, better than all the fuss that started his comment.
vonmoltke 7y ago
"[A] large distribution of software engineers" is a group that has already been, to some degree, filtered by aptitude and interest. "[A] person you'd randomly find at your community pool" is essentially the same as randomly drawing a person from the population at large. Also, "more talented" is a much milder statement than "much more productive", which in turn is a much milder statement than "10x". (The first two, as well, are not saying the same thing. Talent != productivity.) Nobody disputes that there is a distribution of talent or productivity among software engineers. People dispute the magnitude of the standard deviation of that distribution. Going to your Olympic swimmer example, the number of people who qualify for the Olympics in swimming is a small portion of those who try out, which in turn is a small portion of those who are involved in competitive swimming at all levels. Thus, the number of Olympic-level swimmers relative to the overall swimming talent pool is tiny. I don't think anyone disputes that there are a few dozen, maybe even several dozen, people who are several standard deviations better than the average software engineer. What they dispute is that there are companies full of them, or that trying to hire them is a viable strategy.
yowlingcat 7y ago
Okay, but one of these is a massively distributed team and organizational sport, and one of these is an individual sport. One is highly based on hyper-focused physical dexterity and the other is an interdisciplinary form of cooperative knowledge labor to achieve business goals. There's some overlap in so far as technique exists in both, but there exist such vast differences between the failure, passing, and mastery criterion, the process of learning and teaching, and even the actual act of execution that the analogy doesn't really work effectively as a vehicle of language. This isn't to say I fully disagree with your point, by the way. I'd rather use the analogy of a TV producer, or a movie production, or a band. It's creative output, there's tons of variation in the level of natural and practiced talent, it's highly team based, and the work product is very much a knowledge product. But, even there, differences remain between something you have to use and something you can consume for pleasure. How about industrial design firms and elite designers? Well, now we're cooking with gas -- when it comes down to it, engineers are still ultimately designing systems that either are dependencies of other systems that people directly use, or are those systems themselves. What makes someone 10x more productive? Is it that they individually produce 10x more output, or that they understand the nuances of the constraints 10x better, or that they're able to make the engineering lifecycle 10x more effective, or some combination of all of the above? I'd say the latter. In that way, there are almost certainly outliers that are more productive than the mean. And, in my experience, that comes from a combination of individual competence and team/organizational based leadership ability. It's a far cry from the savant 10x individual contributor that the 10x meme originally came from and which many folks across the industry now (rightfully, in my opinion) critique. I've been a "10x engineer" and I'm not sorry. The difference is, it's not the 10x savant individual contributor. I've made entire organizations 10x more effective, but fundamentally, that was because I learned how to be a good multiplier: how to help people out, help them grow, unblock procedural bottlenecks in a lasting way, resolve misalignment between different divisions in an org, refine a product that was missing the forest for the trees, and so many other things. But that did not come from me being some kind of natural genius, or more "talented" -- it came from me being persistent, and never really being satisfied if I thought things could be improved. It came from me doing that over a long enough period of time that my cumulative output and multipliers ended up indeed 10x-ing things. This is the kind of "10x" engineer that I believe most engineers can become -- not easily, but doably. I've built teams and orgs consisting of these kinds of engineers. And, they'll eat your 10x savant contributors for breakfast. How does the old saying go? Culture eats strategy for breakfast? It seems trite, but it's always rung true in my experience.

louhike 7y ago

I don't think it's fair to compare random people in a community pool (even though some can be really good) with engineers with work experience.

ceejayoz 7y ago

Is Michael Phelps ten times faster than your average competitive swimmer, though?

Wald76 7y ago
No but he wins 10 times more often.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  A software development team probably shouldn't be a "one person wins, everyone else loses" scenario, though.
  - chrisan 7y ago
    well to simplify it: if 2 competing companies with 1 programmer each were trying to create $popular_app_or_website then the company with the more productive developer would "win" more often
    - onefuncman 7y ago
      no, businesses win or lose based on sales & marketing, not how productive their engineers are.
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    The ideal "10x engineer" in my mind is one that helps their team win significantly more often. Competitive swimming is maybe not the best analogy (although I have worked with engineers like that before too). If you want sports, maybe basketball. You've got a good team, but you've got a stellar player that makes them all better.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bluedino 7y ago
Switch Michael Phelps with Tom Brady.
zip1234 7y ago
Does Michael Phelps deliver 10x more value than the slowest guy on the US team? The multiplier is for value to the organization.

jimbokun 7y ago

Of course there are far more productive engineers, but this man, while good at his job, and the description of a "10x" engineer in the cited twitter thread, are nothing like actual 10x engineers. The ultimate "10x" engineer, to me, is Peter Norvig. (Maybe a 100x engineer?) For fun, he knocks out a spell checker on a plane ride: https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html In very concise, well documented, easy to read and understand code, with good performance. This isn't because Peter doesn't have to look at documentation or has a black desktop background. It's because he can look at a problem and come up with elegant and creative solutions other engineers wouldn't even think of.

4ntonius8lock 7y ago
Thank you for explaining so succinctly what a 10x engineer is. In fact, that's a 10x for many professions that lend to high creativity and experience. This out of the way reply to a comment on a post that's a reply to a twitter storm. This here, this is a major issue I have with 'news'. We are many times busy discussing crap, which is well defined and easy to understand. But the mundane, easy explanation fails to be bait worthy. Instead what gets picked up is the most extreme, strident and far out explanations. And these seem to dominate public commentary. jimbokun summarized what a 10x engineer is, in an off hand comment, better than all the fuss that started his comment.

vonmoltke 7y ago

"[A] large distribution of software engineers" is a group that has already been, to some degree, filtered by aptitude and interest. "[A] person you'd randomly find at your community pool" is essentially the same as randomly drawing a person from the population at large. Also, "more talented" is a much milder statement than "much more productive", which in turn is a much milder statement than "10x". (The first two, as well, are not saying the same thing. Talent != productivity.) Nobody disputes that there is a distribution of talent or productivity among software engineers. People dispute the magnitude of the standard deviation of that distribution. Going to your Olympic swimmer example, the number of people who qualify for the Olympics in swimming is a small portion of those who try out, which in turn is a small portion of those who are involved in competitive swimming at all levels. Thus, the number of Olympic-level swimmers relative to the overall swimming talent pool is tiny. I don't think anyone disputes that there are a few dozen, maybe even several dozen, people who are several standard deviations better than the average software engineer. What they dispute is that there are companies full of them, or that trying to hire them is a viable strategy.

yowlingcat 7y ago

Okay, but one of these is a massively distributed team and organizational sport, and one of these is an individual sport. One is highly based on hyper-focused physical dexterity and the other is an interdisciplinary form of cooperative knowledge labor to achieve business goals. There's some overlap in so far as technique exists in both, but there exist such vast differences between the failure, passing, and mastery criterion, the process of learning and teaching, and even the actual act of execution that the analogy doesn't really work effectively as a vehicle of language. This isn't to say I fully disagree with your point, by the way. I'd rather use the analogy of a TV producer, or a movie production, or a band. It's creative output, there's tons of variation in the level of natural and practiced talent, it's highly team based, and the work product is very much a knowledge product. But, even there, differences remain between something you have to use and something you can consume for pleasure. How about industrial design firms and elite designers? Well, now we're cooking with gas -- when it comes down to it, engineers are still ultimately designing systems that either are dependencies of other systems that people directly use, or are those systems themselves. What makes someone 10x more productive? Is it that they individually produce 10x more output, or that they understand the nuances of the constraints 10x better, or that they're able to make the engineering lifecycle 10x more effective, or some combination of all of the above? I'd say the latter. In that way, there are almost certainly outliers that are more productive than the mean. And, in my experience, that comes from a combination of individual competence and team/organizational based leadership ability. It's a far cry from the savant 10x individual contributor that the 10x meme originally came from and which many folks across the industry now (rightfully, in my opinion) critique. I've been a "10x engineer" and I'm not sorry. The difference is, it's not the 10x savant individual contributor. I've made entire organizations 10x more effective, but fundamentally, that was because I learned how to be a good multiplier: how to help people out, help them grow, unblock procedural bottlenecks in a lasting way, resolve misalignment between different divisions in an org, refine a product that was missing the forest for the trees, and so many other things. But that did not come from me being some kind of natural genius, or more "talented" -- it came from me being persistent, and never really being satisfied if I thought things could be improved. It came from me doing that over a long enough period of time that my cumulative output and multipliers ended up indeed 10x-ing things. This is the kind of "10x" engineer that I believe most engineers can become -- not easily, but doably. I've built teams and orgs consisting of these kinds of engineers. And, they'll eat your 10x savant contributors for breakfast. How does the old saying go? Culture eats strategy for breakfast? It seems trite, but it's always rung true in my experience.