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As much as people laud 10x engineers, the reality is that if you can make the people around you 2-3x more effective you’re likely adding the value of a 15-20x e

As much as people laud 10x engineers, the reality is that if you can make the people around you 2-3x more effective you’re likely adding the value of a 15-20x engineer without writing a line of code.

romanhn 5y ago
I've never thought of 10x engineers as someone who can crank out 10x amount of code. Influencing others to accomplish larger goals is the best way to scale yourself reliably. And then there are the rare unicorns who can do both, e.g. John Carmack (having indirectly observed his leadership style at Facebook).
- nthj 5y ago
  Yeah, the 10x debate always seems to be just a disagreement of terms. Are we talking about junior engineers shoving lines of code through the JIRA backlog with no negotiation over what the most effective things to be working on are? Probably not 10x variance, and if there is, maybe they're cutting corners on process. Are there people who say "I propose we subtly adjust the product in this way which saves us 7 person-months of development effort and 2 months in time to market while delivering 90% of the original proposal's value?" Yeah, there are, and I don't understand why we pretend that can't be a thing.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    No, you just have impostor syndrome. As I've said before, most SV startup prototypes were written by one or two 10x programmers - without seed funding, it's a necessity. I've met several, so it's real. Youtube was mostly written by 4 people (there's a foto online of the original core team.) WhatsApp was originally written mostly at Red Rock Coffee on Castro St. in MV, so that's only a handful of people: https://twitter.com/redrockcoffee/status/791762563755233280?lang=en https://twitter.com/redrockcoffee/status/791762563755233280?... Instagram (13 employees) was a very small team when bought by FB, so that's a pretty good example. FB itself operated out of a rental house initially. https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-first-13-employees-full-list-2020-4#maykel-loomans-was-one-of-three-employees-who-joined-instagram-right-before-it-was-acquired-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-first-13-employees... MiniVend, PoF and X-Plane are other single-author examples.

romanhn 5y ago

I've never thought of 10x engineers as someone who can crank out 10x amount of code. Influencing others to accomplish larger goals is the best way to scale yourself reliably. And then there are the rare unicorns who can do both, e.g. John Carmack (having indirectly observed his leadership style at Facebook).

nthj 5y ago
Yeah, the 10x debate always seems to be just a disagreement of terms. Are we talking about junior engineers shoving lines of code through the JIRA backlog with no negotiation over what the most effective things to be working on are? Probably not 10x variance, and if there is, maybe they're cutting corners on process. Are there people who say "I propose we subtly adjust the product in this way which saves us 7 person-months of development effort and 2 months in time to market while delivering 90% of the original proposal's value?" Yeah, there are, and I don't understand why we pretend that can't be a thing.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  No, you just have impostor syndrome. As I've said before, most SV startup prototypes were written by one or two 10x programmers - without seed funding, it's a necessity. I've met several, so it's real. Youtube was mostly written by 4 people (there's a foto online of the original core team.) WhatsApp was originally written mostly at Red Rock Coffee on Castro St. in MV, so that's only a handful of people: https://twitter.com/redrockcoffee/status/791762563755233280?lang=en https://twitter.com/redrockcoffee/status/791762563755233280?... Instagram (13 employees) was a very small team when bought by FB, so that's a pretty good example. FB itself operated out of a rental house initially. https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-first-13-employees-full-list-2020-4#maykel-loomans-was-one-of-three-employees-who-joined-instagram-right-before-it-was-acquired-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-first-13-employees... MiniVend, PoF and X-Plane are other single-author examples.