> but I do believe that there are "10x engineers". It's very difficult to read past this statement. However, the follow-up almost redeems it: > That said, th

> but I do believe that there are "10x engineers". It's very difficult to read past this statement. However, the follow-up almost redeems it: > That said, the criteria put forward by the follow up tweets are almost entirely garbage. The tweet he's responding to is hot garbage and it's good that any sane person rejects it. Let's be clear though: There are no 10x engineers (as the industry understands the term, which is about individual excellence over one's peers). There are are engineers who reduce the effectiveness of their peers, so they can claim to be 10x as effective as them. There are 0.1x engineers, whom the average engineer can compare themselves to and decide they're a 10x engineer. I've worked with several over the years! (One in particular was more keenly interested in trying to convert his coworkers to his religion than actual work.) The reason there aren't 10x engineers is, most engineering of sufficient scale or significance is done as a team, not as an individual. My comment isn't sour grapes either. I rewrote a cryptography library in pure PHP, almost entirely on my own. I have an open source library for most security problems that the PHP ecosystem has managed to cook up, and I'm the sole contributor to most of them. People have called me a "10x engineer" before. I reject the title, and you should too. We can all accomplish more by working together than we can silo'd. Build bridges, not walls. Gatekeeping and arrogance are both stupid.