11 ms·

Playmaker: The Reality of 10x Engineer

105 points by oferka 6y ago

beagle3 6y ago
Very relevant: https://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html https://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html I agree with yosefk's observation. The people who are consistently 10x more effective are, in my experience, those who manage not to deal with unavoidable-accidental-complexity in problems. It's not their only strength, of course -- they are also very good at what they do. But e.g. if your work depends on another person responding to your work in some way (e.g. interfacing to a buggy system you have no visibility into), it doesn't matter how fast/good you are - the progress is throttled by the other party. I haven't seen anyone 10x their way through such a setting.
jl2718 6y ago
Engineering companies used to be organized by function rather than business. This 10x engineer would be a manager. The person in charge of you was the person that you can learn the most from. Project, program, and financial management came from a business group. This was before the popularity of the MBA. I think what happened is that there is a massive oversupply of management, and it’s harder for engineers to keep skills current, so senior engineers tend toward business activities. Of course this means juniors stagnate technically as well, so the only way forward is through entrenching oneself as management. What you’re describing is a 10x leader, and you’re not going to get 10x from a newcomer to a team that already has a leader. More likely you’ll get an exit due to ‘bad fit’. Consider also that 10x is the expected benefit of leadership. Those that seek a 10x engineer should probably look at the 1x manager.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
If you work in a shitty workplace where everyone is demotivated. You have a good work ethic. In fact if they only work at 10% and you work at 100%. You're 10x those peers. You end up doing 10x the work as your peers because they do nothing. Whereas if you work at a place that has good management, people are motivated to work because they are well respected and not micromanaged. Suddenly if you work 100%, so are your coworkers working 100%. You aren't 10x. So you have to work on boosting your coworkers.
rurban 6y ago
For me a 10x engineer is an engineer who gets the work done, in opposite to the average developer who gets the work not done. Eventually in 2-5 years, but who needs that. Mostly not at all, or with huge cost overruns. Additionally many developers are costing more than they gain, the 1/10 developer, but more like the negative developer. The ones you need to get rid of, but mostly gather around senior management, CEO and blocking progress and playing politics. They usually are promoted to managers, and that's where the big trouble starts. Most complicated work is too hard for any normal developer (the 95%), you need to get the developers who can get it done. It's simply binary, not 10x or rockstar. Either it works or not.
yibg 6y ago
The article and comments here matches my observations. There are many ways to be a 10x engineers but basically none of them is about writing better code or solving algorithm problem (outside of a few very specific domains). Writing good code is necessary to be a competent engineer and one need to be competent before becoming 10x, but it’s not a sufficient condition. Yet this is what almost all companies that are looking for 10x engineers primarily test for during interviews; their ability to write code. Seems to be a mismatch there.
derek1800 6y ago
Neither of these types align with my definition of a 10x engineer. From my experience, they are engineers that understand both product/business as well as the technical side such that they can drop requirements that add a very small amount of improvement and in turn it significantly reduces implementation cost/complexity. They have the ability to instantly visualize system design and architecture for any features/new items enabling to quickly make these realizations and move fast. At the end of the day the ROI is what matters and SDE resourcing/capacity is the most limited resource. I have seen 100 SDE week projects turned into 4 weeks from individuals with this skillset.
- lovetocode 6y ago
  I agree with your statement. A 10x engineer doesn’t deliver code 10x faster but rather delivers 10x value to the company. They are more than an engineer who plugs code in an IDE. They are a company man/woman who understands the business, business processes and the customer. A 10x engineer can anticipate the needs of the sales and finance teams. They understand how technology can impact the customer or how the business generates revenue. A 10x engineer isn’t always the person who places 1st in a coding competition or knows how to write every sorting algorithm without reference.
- maxekman 6y ago
  I’ve heard the term Product Engineer used to describe those qualities.
  - kqr 6y ago
    I'd prefer the term Engineer... I'm not sure why the best engineers need a separate job description!
    - ebiester 6y ago
      Because there are many ways to be a developer, and it depends on your role and your product to say what is the most effective. Sometimes "10x" is a matter of fit. Consider an engineer who is dedicated to performance. In the wrong organization, this kind of person can be harmful or neutral. However, if the same person at Twitter in the "fail whale" era, they may be a key contributor to keeping the organization afloat until more substantive changes take effect. In a B2C company, product engineers are more evident. At a B2B in a sector that isn't self-evident, the same product engineer may not have the domain expertise to contribute in the same way. It is one aptitude that many effective engineers have, though.
wolco2 6y ago
"I want to take you back to 2012. I was working for HP, leading the R&D group" Please don't take me back to hp in 2012.
- oferka 6y ago
  LOL. "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes" - Oscar Wilde
jt2190 6y ago
> ... if so many employers are looking for 10x engineers and some are willing to pay them 5x or even more... Now we’re no longer talking about productivity but about value. Why a company decides to pay well above the average for an individual is going to depend on a lot of things, starting with whether they can even afford to pay this much. Edit: Making these pay levels all about productivity, in yourself or others, ignores a lot of other avenues that can increase your value.
- oferka 6y ago
  Agree. productivity as in "works faster" is not something that justifies being treated (and payed) as 10x engineer. Evaluating "value" of an engineer is also a topic of itself. At the end of the day, this is a team sport. even when a certain project is super successful (and in some cases it might take few month to see business impact) it's not always easy to know how much each individual in the team contributed to this success. BTW - same is true for failure.
TheBigSalad 6y ago
Your weekly reminder that the 10x engineer theory is that the best engineers are 10x better than the worst engineers. Which means they are 2 to 3x your average engineer. They aren't going to make your team 10x better unless your team is really bad.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  Your yearly reminder that the original use of 10x engineer referred to an engineer who took 10 times longer to the same task as the typical engineer, and has also been variously subverted since in a variety of ways including the “team multiplier that isn’t especially more productive, but is the secret sauce that makes the team 10x more productive.”
- partyboat1586 6y ago
  This is good to know. I always thought it meant 10x average which seemed absurd. I can certainly attest to having worked on teams where there are one or two developers 10x better than the worst developers on the team. Tbh I think the worst developers are actually negative value because they take so much time from other developers.
  - qznc 6y ago
    One source for the 10x number is the book Peopleware. They did Coding War Games where developer got an exercise. The 10x is the time it took them to code an application which fulfills the requirements. The best is 2.5x compared to average. Since it is a single person task, they cannot impact anyone negatively. However, the most interesting fact in my opinion is that within the same organization the difference is only 0.3x. Either the organizational environment determines your productivity or the organization determines which kind of developers get there. The experiment does not tell us anything how the productivity of a developer changes when he changes organizations.
    - kqr 6y ago
      "A bad system will beat a good person every time" as Deming said.
cryptica 6y ago
Nobody wants 10x developers these days. All companies are looking for 1/x developers because then they can brag about their head count to get acquired or to raise more money from investors or banks.
- oferka 6y ago
  Not sure about the entire industry, but at least for the companies I worked in/with during the last few years, it's the opposite. In most investment rounds/IPO/acquisition scenarios, high HC is a disadvantage. I have seen investors that are actually treating the revenue per HC number as a performance indicator.
  - gt565k 6y ago
    Exactly! The idea that having more employees is better is complete BS. We all know that start-ups work because they are small and focus on problem solving, not dealing with bureaucracy and administrative inefficiencies. Look at the whatsapp acquisition. It was touted so much because the company had only 50 engineers. High revenue per headcount is a good indicator of successful execution, good hiring practices and organizational structure, and a solid culture. If you can achieve the same results with 5 people that a company needs 20 people for, you'll obviously be the more profitable and desirable company for a VC to invest in.
  - qznc 6y ago
    You have to distinguish between the incentives for the company and individuals. For example, it makes little sense for a company to use a different web framework every year. It makes sense for individual developers to accumulate a large list for their resume. Likewise, it makes not sense for a company to optimize for a large headcount. It does make sense for an individual manager because leading 100 people looks better than 20 on his resume.
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    Bad for the company, good for middle managers that can brag about managing 50 eng at their next gig
- 6y ago
sontek 6y ago
At least for me, when I hear "10x" engineer I think of the ones who treat the craft as a craft. There is no "shallow" or "narrow" in them. The possess the important skills in software development: - ability to learn quickly - understanding how to debug and track down problems - not afraid to jump in where needed I've worked with plenty of "frontend" engineers and "backend" engineers. I've worked with people who are "SREs". These people have specialized and are usually GREAT at their craft. But I don't lump them into the 10x engineer. For me the 10x engineer is the one who will jump in on react one day and then rust the next. They'll write ansible scripts and automate SSL renewal and then fix a CSS bug the next day. They'll talk through problems with anyone on the team and help get through the block. Think of people like Miguel de Icaza ( https://github.com/migueldeicaza https://github.com/migueldeicaza ) who have such knowledge and skill to build complete popular programming languages (Mono), Cross Platform Mobile Platforms (Xamarin), Spreadsheet Applications (Gnumeric). But have no problem building simple iPhone apps in swift. Think of people like Anthony Sottile (https://github.com/asottile https://github.com/asottile) who works on most of the developer tools us python devs use on a daily basis (tox, pytest, virtualenv, etc). Who maintains and builds ubuntu and debian repos for every new release of Python so we can get it easily (deadsnakes). But spends time to explain simple concepts like using "--rm" with docker run to developers. If you have worked with someone like them, you know you are in the presence of a 10x engineer. There is no doubt in your mind.
bob1029 6y ago
For me, a 10x engineer is about rate of value-add. Maybe its some of my manufacturing background, but I feel like the best engineers are constantly thinking about how they can increase the value of the product relative to customers (internal or external). These are the only things that really seem to matter at the end of the day. Would you consider someone a 10x engineer if they can crank out a super-fancy backend service in 1 weekend that nobody wants to pay for or actually use? I know a lot of developers who occasionally fall into this trap (myself certainly not excluded). They can very enthusiastically produce output at the drop of a hat, but then we frequently have to put this output in the scrap bin and figure out how to recover the wasted time. This is why for most developers we have to have explicit design review sessions to make sure we are staying focused on the important value drivers. I have to make sure our work activities are well-scoped and broken down into small enough pieces to prevent elaborate trips into Alice's Wonderland. Note that when I talk about value-add, that also includes paying off technical debt. Determining what debt to pay off is just as important as determining what new features to roll out. Determining how to balance debt vs feature development is one of the most arcane and dark magics. This is where the 10x thrives.
- kqr 6y ago
  So much this. Quantifying the cost of delay and prioritising the things that have a high cost of delay over duration (CD3) in order to get the most value out the quickest (even if that turns out to be paying off technical debt where accrued interest is the cost of delay) is the hallmark of a fantastic engineer (and product owner, and salesperson, and ...). I've been missing this opinion in virtually every productivity discussion on HN the last few weeks, at least, but could never be bothered to write the comment. Thank you for taking the time!
- amelius 6y ago
  > Would you consider someone a 10x engineer if they can crank out a super-fancy backend service in 1 weekend that nobody wants to pay for or actually use? They would perhaps be a 9x engineer, but that's still fine. I don't think a 10x engineer, like most people, would want to be "optimized" at all costs. And since you mentioned "1 weekend", I think that says it all. It's their spare time, and if they want to use it for coding, then that's their choice.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
karmakaze 6y ago
It's pretty much all of the things mentioned in the post and comments. You don't really know you had a 10x until they leave then little by little problems show up more frequently, take a bit more time and people to fix, trends upward, then snowballs and no one really knows how they got to this point. Having 10x is like having elves that magically make problems you don't know about continue to not be exist in most everyone's worlds.
birdyrooster 6y ago
My favorite thing about 10X engineers is that I don’t have to lose my own sleep or salary. I’m pretty sure life is a marathon and if you try to go too fast you will bonk eventually. I hit my threshold but I am glad they haven’t. I used to be a 10X engineer in my 20s but since getting a little older with a family I can’t.
com2kid 6y ago
I once had an employee who was by no means a 10x engineer, he was honestly lacking in a couple of technical areas. He was a 10x catalyst for the team though. Everyone came and talked to him about their problems, he motivated people to learn new skills, and he knew at least a couple developers on every one of our partner teams. If I wanted to cut through the BS and find out what was really going on, I'd just ask him. "Oh John's team is actually behind schedule, their PM is full of it and their lead is in denial, they'll actually ship a couple weeks late at best." Was he a 10x engineer in terms of code written? He had his moments for sure (some of which had huge business impact), but his real value was all the connections he had formed.
- b20000 6y ago
  so you valued him for being a little snitch?
- blackoil 6y ago
  He seems like to be a highly skilled product manager than a developer, both are different roles and people should be motivated for the right track.
  - hiptobecubic 6y ago
    No. This idea that developers just write code and leave all the "squishy" problems to the pointy-haired bosses is not only wrong, but actively hurts teams. If you move this person from engineering to PM, they will not function in the same way.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
  I don't think the 10x engineer idea was targeted at the coding skills itself. Given that, the engineer you mentioned is definitely a 10x
- SwiftyBug 6y ago
  This is what I hope to be for my team as I feel like I'm at least a -3x engineer.
somurzakov 6y ago
10x engineer is underpaid senior working as middle/junior. or underpaid architech/principal workong as senior engineer.
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  Exactly. Everyone wants more developer for the same amount of money, but are they willing to pay?
- ledauphin 6y ago
  10x definitely has nothing to do with salary in either direction - you can't conflate productivity with salary and expect to make sense of the world we operate in.
  - somurzakov 6y ago
    just bump your 10x engineers in grade and salary and suddenly nobody will think of them as 10x engineers. They will be just typical specialists at their place and their level. or there could be another possibility: You think you have 10x engineer on your team, but actually you don't have them. You just keep employing a lot of 0.1x engineers that are unfit for their position/level/grade I think the latter view is why companies like amazon/netflix fire a lot of engineers that they think are 0.1x or less than 1x
barnacled 6y ago
I'm not a fan of the 10x programmer concept. I have worked with some brilliant people, some incredibly efficient people, as well as both medicore and poor coders. There are things brilliant programmer can do and concepts they can realise or creativity they can apply that a poor programmer couldn't dream of. But it's never quite so simple as 10x, never so easy to quantify as their being able to complete a given task faster or produce more work. What I have seen far more often however are programmers finding sneaky ways to appear more productive. Cutting corners, hacking things in and - an often overlooked technique - happening to have a such a good knowledge of their own pile of crud messy code that they can in fact produce solutions _considerably_ more quickly (because you know your own mess better than other people's). None of these types of programmer are good for an organisation, some in fact are positively toxic and very destructive. In many cases a better programmer would take longer, sometimes considerably more so. But by perpetuating this 10x idea things get topsy-turvy and it's the poorer coder who gets categorised as brilliant and the brilliant coder who gets categorised as poor. Another aspect of the 'rock star programmer' meme (which this is a variant of) is somebody who's genuinely very sharp can often be good at coming up with ideas but lousy at implementing them and worse at taking criticism. I've seen an extreme example of this in my career. Often the best solution requires careful thought, consideration and design. The best programmers are the ones who weigh up the RoI and, while remaining practical, think things through carefully. Unfortunately I've worked at a startup (from employee #1 to multiple VC rounds) where the CEO believed in this meme and seen the damage it does first hand.
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
  It's a really dumb (in a midwit way characteristic of the engineer) approach to thinking about teams. It misleads people who are already inclined by their professional deformation toward thinking of people as quantities or black-box abstractions, making them even worse at leadership.
lambda_obrien 6y ago
Make your own 10x engineer by investing time and money into your engineers so they get 10x better. You can try to suss out which interviewee was the best, or you can define what makes a 10x engineer at your org and train your current employees to that level. Everyone's has their area where they are 10x, find that for your employees and bring it out.
kyranjamie 6y ago
Some well thought out points in this post. I'm of the opinion, though, that the concept of a "10x engineer" just isn't a something to be advocating. In all walks of life, there are the weak, the strong, and all colours in the middle. Why do the strongest need to be labeled with an exact number? It implies there's a sort of fixed scale, that someone could be an 7x or 8x engineer. It's a form of gate keeping in the same way that being "senior" engineer was/is a coveted title to be earnt. The best people should be celebrated and rewarded accordingly, but we should move away from absolutist titles that push people to strive for a completely subjective label.
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
Under-acknowledged: The path of least resistance to 10x is to make everyone else Ax where 0 < A < 1. Every "10x engineer" I've ever had the misfortune of working with was 10x by virtue of his (always his) dampening effect on the productivity of his peers, either in 1:1 interactions or by making team meetings awful experiences.
ncmncm 6y ago
I know an, objectively, 500x engineer. This was measurable because of a joint venture between Siemens and Ericsson, in the '90s. Each sent 500 engineers. They had six months to produce a deliverable, that could not be late: the classic Death March project. This engineer was responsible for assigning tasks to the others, and to himself. Each engineer got two-week tasks. Come 2nd Friday, if somebody's task wasn't done yet, he did it himself, over the weekend. At project end, fully half the code committed to the delivered product was his. The project was unusual in other ways. Stress is objectively measurable given blood samples, which they took. His were the only that did not show rising stress. They took samples again months after the project ended. Stress levels (in the others) had not declined. Death March projects are really, really harmful: physically harmful to engineers, but also to companies that hope to get something from those engineers afterward. He knew someone else who coded 10x faster than he did, wearing out 2 keyboards a year. So, he wasn't proud. 500x was enough for him.
- aksjfnkajsnd 6y ago
  Why were they taking engineer blood samples?
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    To see. Burn-out has a lot of practical importance.
- troughway 6y ago
  Finally a decent fucking story. I want to know more.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    The joint project was called Ellemtel. I knew the project lead, and the guy who counted up whose code it all was. I don't know if anything was published about the project, I just got these details from them. Thinking it over, it must have been 250 engineers each, 500 total.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
sharadov 6y ago
I've met some 10X engineers, not the one's you've described but ones that take 10X the time to finish than they initially estimated.

105 points by oferka 6y ago

Very relevant: https://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html https://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html I agree with yosefk's observation. The people who are consistently 10x more effective are, in my experience, those who manage not to deal with unavoidable-accidental-complexity in problems. It's not their only strength, of course -- they are also very good at what they do. But e.g. if your work depends on another person responding to your work in some way (e.g. interfacing to a buggy system you have no visibility into), it doesn't matter how fast/good you are - the progress is throttled by the other party. I haven't seen anyone 10x their way through such a setting.

jl2718 6y ago

Engineering companies used to be organized by function rather than business. This 10x engineer would be a manager. The person in charge of you was the person that you can learn the most from. Project, program, and financial management came from a business group. This was before the popularity of the MBA. I think what happened is that there is a massive oversupply of management, and it’s harder for engineers to keep skills current, so senior engineers tend toward business activities. Of course this means juniors stagnate technically as well, so the only way forward is through entrenching oneself as management. What you’re describing is a 10x leader, and you’re not going to get 10x from a newcomer to a team that already has a leader. More likely you’ll get an exit due to ‘bad fit’. Consider also that 10x is the expected benefit of leadership. Those that seek a 10x engineer should probably look at the 1x manager.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

If you work in a shitty workplace where everyone is demotivated. You have a good work ethic. In fact if they only work at 10% and you work at 100%. You're 10x those peers. You end up doing 10x the work as your peers because they do nothing. Whereas if you work at a place that has good management, people are motivated to work because they are well respected and not micromanaged. Suddenly if you work 100%, so are your coworkers working 100%. You aren't 10x. So you have to work on boosting your coworkers.

rurban 6y ago

For me a 10x engineer is an engineer who gets the work done, in opposite to the average developer who gets the work not done. Eventually in 2-5 years, but who needs that. Mostly not at all, or with huge cost overruns. Additionally many developers are costing more than they gain, the 1/10 developer, but more like the negative developer. The ones you need to get rid of, but mostly gather around senior management, CEO and blocking progress and playing politics. They usually are promoted to managers, and that's where the big trouble starts. Most complicated work is too hard for any normal developer (the 95%), you need to get the developers who can get it done. It's simply binary, not 10x or rockstar. Either it works or not.

yibg 6y ago

The article and comments here matches my observations. There are many ways to be a 10x engineers but basically none of them is about writing better code or solving algorithm problem (outside of a few very specific domains). Writing good code is necessary to be a competent engineer and one need to be competent before becoming 10x, but it’s not a sufficient condition. Yet this is what almost all companies that are looking for 10x engineers primarily test for during interviews; their ability to write code. Seems to be a mismatch there.

derek1800 6y ago

Neither of these types align with my definition of a 10x engineer. From my experience, they are engineers that understand both product/business as well as the technical side such that they can drop requirements that add a very small amount of improvement and in turn it significantly reduces implementation cost/complexity. They have the ability to instantly visualize system design and architecture for any features/new items enabling to quickly make these realizations and move fast. At the end of the day the ROI is what matters and SDE resourcing/capacity is the most limited resource. I have seen 100 SDE week projects turned into 4 weeks from individuals with this skillset.

lovetocode 6y ago
I agree with your statement. A 10x engineer doesn’t deliver code 10x faster but rather delivers 10x value to the company. They are more than an engineer who plugs code in an IDE. They are a company man/woman who understands the business, business processes and the customer. A 10x engineer can anticipate the needs of the sales and finance teams. They understand how technology can impact the customer or how the business generates revenue. A 10x engineer isn’t always the person who places 1st in a coding competition or knows how to write every sorting algorithm without reference.
maxekman 6y ago
I’ve heard the term Product Engineer used to describe those qualities.
- kqr 6y ago
  I'd prefer the term Engineer... I'm not sure why the best engineers need a separate job description!
  - ebiester 6y ago
    Because there are many ways to be a developer, and it depends on your role and your product to say what is the most effective. Sometimes "10x" is a matter of fit. Consider an engineer who is dedicated to performance. In the wrong organization, this kind of person can be harmful or neutral. However, if the same person at Twitter in the "fail whale" era, they may be a key contributor to keeping the organization afloat until more substantive changes take effect. In a B2C company, product engineers are more evident. At a B2B in a sector that isn't self-evident, the same product engineer may not have the domain expertise to contribute in the same way. It is one aptitude that many effective engineers have, though.

wolco2 6y ago

"I want to take you back to 2012. I was working for HP, leading the R&D group" Please don't take me back to hp in 2012.

oferka 6y ago
LOL. "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes" - Oscar Wilde

jt2190 6y ago

> ... if so many employers are looking for 10x engineers and some are willing to pay them 5x or even more... Now we’re no longer talking about productivity but about value. Why a company decides to pay well above the average for an individual is going to depend on a lot of things, starting with whether they can even afford to pay this much. Edit: Making these pay levels all about productivity, in yourself or others, ignores a lot of other avenues that can increase your value.

oferka 6y ago
Agree. productivity as in "works faster" is not something that justifies being treated (and payed) as 10x engineer. Evaluating "value" of an engineer is also a topic of itself. At the end of the day, this is a team sport. even when a certain project is super successful (and in some cases it might take few month to see business impact) it's not always easy to know how much each individual in the team contributed to this success. BTW - same is true for failure.

TheBigSalad 6y ago

Your weekly reminder that the 10x engineer theory is that the best engineers are 10x better than the worst engineers. Which means they are 2 to 3x your average engineer. They aren't going to make your team 10x better unless your team is really bad.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
Your yearly reminder that the original use of 10x engineer referred to an engineer who took 10 times longer to the same task as the typical engineer, and has also been variously subverted since in a variety of ways including the “team multiplier that isn’t especially more productive, but is the secret sauce that makes the team 10x more productive.”
partyboat1586 6y ago
This is good to know. I always thought it meant 10x average which seemed absurd. I can certainly attest to having worked on teams where there are one or two developers 10x better than the worst developers on the team. Tbh I think the worst developers are actually negative value because they take so much time from other developers.
- qznc 6y ago
  One source for the 10x number is the book Peopleware. They did Coding War Games where developer got an exercise. The 10x is the time it took them to code an application which fulfills the requirements. The best is 2.5x compared to average. Since it is a single person task, they cannot impact anyone negatively. However, the most interesting fact in my opinion is that within the same organization the difference is only 0.3x. Either the organizational environment determines your productivity or the organization determines which kind of developers get there. The experiment does not tell us anything how the productivity of a developer changes when he changes organizations.
  - kqr 6y ago
    "A bad system will beat a good person every time" as Deming said.

cryptica 6y ago

Nobody wants 10x developers these days. All companies are looking for 1/x developers because then they can brag about their head count to get acquired or to raise more money from investors or banks.

oferka 6y ago
Not sure about the entire industry, but at least for the companies I worked in/with during the last few years, it's the opposite. In most investment rounds/IPO/acquisition scenarios, high HC is a disadvantage. I have seen investors that are actually treating the revenue per HC number as a performance indicator.
- gt565k 6y ago
  Exactly! The idea that having more employees is better is complete BS. We all know that start-ups work because they are small and focus on problem solving, not dealing with bureaucracy and administrative inefficiencies. Look at the whatsapp acquisition. It was touted so much because the company had only 50 engineers. High revenue per headcount is a good indicator of successful execution, good hiring practices and organizational structure, and a solid culture. If you can achieve the same results with 5 people that a company needs 20 people for, you'll obviously be the more profitable and desirable company for a VC to invest in.
- qznc 6y ago
  You have to distinguish between the incentives for the company and individuals. For example, it makes little sense for a company to use a different web framework every year. It makes sense for individual developers to accumulate a large list for their resume. Likewise, it makes not sense for a company to optimize for a large headcount. It does make sense for an individual manager because leading 100 people looks better than 20 on his resume.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  Bad for the company, good for middle managers that can brag about managing 50 eng at their next gig
6y ago

sontek 6y ago

At least for me, when I hear "10x" engineer I think of the ones who treat the craft as a craft. There is no "shallow" or "narrow" in them. The possess the important skills in software development: - ability to learn quickly - understanding how to debug and track down problems - not afraid to jump in where needed I've worked with plenty of "frontend" engineers and "backend" engineers. I've worked with people who are "SREs". These people have specialized and are usually GREAT at their craft. But I don't lump them into the 10x engineer. For me the 10x engineer is the one who will jump in on react one day and then rust the next. They'll write ansible scripts and automate SSL renewal and then fix a CSS bug the next day. They'll talk through problems with anyone on the team and help get through the block. Think of people like Miguel de Icaza ( https://github.com/migueldeicaza https://github.com/migueldeicaza ) who have such knowledge and skill to build complete popular programming languages (Mono), Cross Platform Mobile Platforms (Xamarin), Spreadsheet Applications (Gnumeric). But have no problem building simple iPhone apps in swift. Think of people like Anthony Sottile (https://github.com/asottile https://github.com/asottile) who works on most of the developer tools us python devs use on a daily basis (tox, pytest, virtualenv, etc). Who maintains and builds ubuntu and debian repos for every new release of Python so we can get it easily (deadsnakes). But spends time to explain simple concepts like using "--rm" with docker run to developers. If you have worked with someone like them, you know you are in the presence of a 10x engineer. There is no doubt in your mind.

bob1029 6y ago

For me, a 10x engineer is about rate of value-add. Maybe its some of my manufacturing background, but I feel like the best engineers are constantly thinking about how they can increase the value of the product relative to customers (internal or external). These are the only things that really seem to matter at the end of the day. Would you consider someone a 10x engineer if they can crank out a super-fancy backend service in 1 weekend that nobody wants to pay for or actually use? I know a lot of developers who occasionally fall into this trap (myself certainly not excluded). They can very enthusiastically produce output at the drop of a hat, but then we frequently have to put this output in the scrap bin and figure out how to recover the wasted time. This is why for most developers we have to have explicit design review sessions to make sure we are staying focused on the important value drivers. I have to make sure our work activities are well-scoped and broken down into small enough pieces to prevent elaborate trips into Alice's Wonderland. Note that when I talk about value-add, that also includes paying off technical debt. Determining what debt to pay off is just as important as determining what new features to roll out. Determining how to balance debt vs feature development is one of the most arcane and dark magics. This is where the 10x thrives.

kqr 6y ago
So much this. Quantifying the cost of delay and prioritising the things that have a high cost of delay over duration (CD3) in order to get the most value out the quickest (even if that turns out to be paying off technical debt where accrued interest is the cost of delay) is the hallmark of a fantastic engineer (and product owner, and salesperson, and ...). I've been missing this opinion in virtually every productivity discussion on HN the last few weeks, at least, but could never be bothered to write the comment. Thank you for taking the time!
amelius 6y ago
> Would you consider someone a 10x engineer if they can crank out a super-fancy backend service in 1 weekend that nobody wants to pay for or actually use? They would perhaps be a 9x engineer, but that's still fine. I don't think a 10x engineer, like most people, would want to be "optimized" at all costs. And since you mentioned "1 weekend", I think that says it all. It's their spare time, and if they want to use it for coding, then that's their choice.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

karmakaze 6y ago

It's pretty much all of the things mentioned in the post and comments. You don't really know you had a 10x until they leave then little by little problems show up more frequently, take a bit more time and people to fix, trends upward, then snowballs and no one really knows how they got to this point. Having 10x is like having elves that magically make problems you don't know about continue to not be exist in most everyone's worlds.

birdyrooster 6y ago

My favorite thing about 10X engineers is that I don’t have to lose my own sleep or salary. I’m pretty sure life is a marathon and if you try to go too fast you will bonk eventually. I hit my threshold but I am glad they haven’t. I used to be a 10X engineer in my 20s but since getting a little older with a family I can’t.

com2kid 6y ago

I once had an employee who was by no means a 10x engineer, he was honestly lacking in a couple of technical areas. He was a 10x catalyst for the team though. Everyone came and talked to him about their problems, he motivated people to learn new skills, and he knew at least a couple developers on every one of our partner teams. If I wanted to cut through the BS and find out what was really going on, I'd just ask him. "Oh John's team is actually behind schedule, their PM is full of it and their lead is in denial, they'll actually ship a couple weeks late at best." Was he a 10x engineer in terms of code written? He had his moments for sure (some of which had huge business impact), but his real value was all the connections he had formed.

b20000 6y ago
so you valued him for being a little snitch?
blackoil 6y ago
He seems like to be a highly skilled product manager than a developer, both are different roles and people should be motivated for the right track.
- hiptobecubic 6y ago
  No. This idea that developers just write code and leave all the "squishy" problems to the pointy-haired bosses is not only wrong, but actively hurts teams. If you move this person from engineering to PM, they will not function in the same way.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
I don't think the 10x engineer idea was targeted at the coding skills itself. Given that, the engineer you mentioned is definitely a 10x
SwiftyBug 6y ago
This is what I hope to be for my team as I feel like I'm at least a -3x engineer.

somurzakov 6y ago

10x engineer is underpaid senior working as middle/junior. or underpaid architech/principal workong as senior engineer.

phendrenad2 6y ago
Exactly. Everyone wants more developer for the same amount of money, but are they willing to pay?
ledauphin 6y ago
10x definitely has nothing to do with salary in either direction - you can't conflate productivity with salary and expect to make sense of the world we operate in.
- somurzakov 6y ago
  just bump your 10x engineers in grade and salary and suddenly nobody will think of them as 10x engineers. They will be just typical specialists at their place and their level. or there could be another possibility: You think you have 10x engineer on your team, but actually you don't have them. You just keep employing a lot of 0.1x engineers that are unfit for their position/level/grade I think the latter view is why companies like amazon/netflix fire a lot of engineers that they think are 0.1x or less than 1x

barnacled 6y ago

I'm not a fan of the 10x programmer concept. I have worked with some brilliant people, some incredibly efficient people, as well as both medicore and poor coders. There are things brilliant programmer can do and concepts they can realise or creativity they can apply that a poor programmer couldn't dream of. But it's never quite so simple as 10x, never so easy to quantify as their being able to complete a given task faster or produce more work. What I have seen far more often however are programmers finding sneaky ways to appear more productive. Cutting corners, hacking things in and - an often overlooked technique - happening to have a such a good knowledge of their own pile of crud messy code that they can in fact produce solutions _considerably_ more quickly (because you know your own mess better than other people's). None of these types of programmer are good for an organisation, some in fact are positively toxic and very destructive. In many cases a better programmer would take longer, sometimes considerably more so. But by perpetuating this 10x idea things get topsy-turvy and it's the poorer coder who gets categorised as brilliant and the brilliant coder who gets categorised as poor. Another aspect of the 'rock star programmer' meme (which this is a variant of) is somebody who's genuinely very sharp can often be good at coming up with ideas but lousy at implementing them and worse at taking criticism. I've seen an extreme example of this in my career. Often the best solution requires careful thought, consideration and design. The best programmers are the ones who weigh up the RoI and, while remaining practical, think things through carefully. Unfortunately I've worked at a startup (from employee #1 to multiple VC rounds) where the CEO believed in this meme and seen the damage it does first hand.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
It's a really dumb (in a midwit way characteristic of the engineer) approach to thinking about teams. It misleads people who are already inclined by their professional deformation toward thinking of people as quantities or black-box abstractions, making them even worse at leadership.

lambda_obrien 6y ago

Make your own 10x engineer by investing time and money into your engineers so they get 10x better. You can try to suss out which interviewee was the best, or you can define what makes a 10x engineer at your org and train your current employees to that level. Everyone's has their area where they are 10x, find that for your employees and bring it out.

kyranjamie 6y ago

Some well thought out points in this post. I'm of the opinion, though, that the concept of a "10x engineer" just isn't a something to be advocating. In all walks of life, there are the weak, the strong, and all colours in the middle. Why do the strongest need to be labeled with an exact number? It implies there's a sort of fixed scale, that someone could be an 7x or 8x engineer. It's a form of gate keeping in the same way that being "senior" engineer was/is a coveted title to be earnt. The best people should be celebrated and rewarded accordingly, but we should move away from absolutist titles that push people to strive for a completely subjective label.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

Under-acknowledged: The path of least resistance to 10x is to make everyone else Ax where 0 < A < 1. Every "10x engineer" I've ever had the misfortune of working with was 10x by virtue of his (always his) dampening effect on the productivity of his peers, either in 1:1 interactions or by making team meetings awful experiences.

ncmncm 6y ago

I know an, objectively, 500x engineer. This was measurable because of a joint venture between Siemens and Ericsson, in the '90s. Each sent 500 engineers. They had six months to produce a deliverable, that could not be late: the classic Death March project. This engineer was responsible for assigning tasks to the others, and to himself. Each engineer got two-week tasks. Come 2nd Friday, if somebody's task wasn't done yet, he did it himself, over the weekend. At project end, fully half the code committed to the delivered product was his. The project was unusual in other ways. Stress is objectively measurable given blood samples, which they took. His were the only that did not show rising stress. They took samples again months after the project ended. Stress levels (in the others) had not declined. Death March projects are really, really harmful: physically harmful to engineers, but also to companies that hope to get something from those engineers afterward. He knew someone else who coded 10x faster than he did, wearing out 2 keyboards a year. So, he wasn't proud. 500x was enough for him.

aksjfnkajsnd 6y ago
Why were they taking engineer blood samples?
- ncmncm 6y ago
  To see. Burn-out has a lot of practical importance.
troughway 6y ago
Finally a decent fucking story. I want to know more.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  The joint project was called Ellemtel. I knew the project lead, and the guy who counted up whose code it all was. I don't know if anything was published about the project, I just got these details from them. Thinking it over, it must have been 250 engineers each, 500 total.
- ncmncm 6y ago

sharadov 6y ago

I've met some 10X engineers, not the one's you've described but ones that take 10X the time to finish than they initially estimated.