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The original studies that gave us the concept of a 10x engineer tracked defect rate and speed on programming tasks. You're using your own definition of an Nx en

by strken 5y ago

The original studies that gave us the concept of a 10x engineer tracked defect rate and speed on programming tasks. You're using your own definition of an Nx engineer that: - does not relate to speed or defect rate - does not provide any way to quantify what N is - does not explain how an Nx engineer differs from a normal competent engineer There's no problem with saying "engineers who can solve novel open-ended problems exist", the problem is that there's no reason to call those engineers 10x, no reason to suggest ability to solve those problems is a yes/no question, and no link to the original studies that we got the concept of a 10x engineer from. I remain unconvinced that the concept of 10x engineers is very useful.

karmakaze 5y ago
The difference isn't only in how fast/well tasks get done, but a very good engineer will make many such tasks unnecessary altogether with better design and implementations that forego their need. Without including this aspect, the metric is a low-level one and not indicative of overall impact.
- strken 5y ago
  That's the point. If you don't have a metric that says "Alice is 10x better than Bob" and you don't specify a task she's better at, then what you really mean is "Alice is on average and by some unknown factor much better than Bob on the tasks she performs". Framing it as though you have a rigorous comparison between them will mislead you into thinking about engineers as if they were fungible, like diesel generators, which is a very silly way to think about a divide-and-conquer field like software engineering where engineers develop different levels of expertise in different things. If you're suggesting there is some underlying factor, like generalised intelligence, I'm not arguing with that! I strongly disagree that factor has anything to do with the number 10, or that engineers fall into discrete 1x and 10x camps, though. I think the phrase "10x engineer" leads to logical fallacies about performance.

by strken 5y ago

karmakaze 5y ago

The difference isn't only in how fast/well tasks get done, but a very good engineer will make many such tasks unnecessary altogether with better design and implementations that forego their need. Without including this aspect, the metric is a low-level one and not indicative of overall impact.

strken 5y ago
That's the point. If you don't have a metric that says "Alice is 10x better than Bob" and you don't specify a task she's better at, then what you really mean is "Alice is on average and by some unknown factor much better than Bob on the tasks she performs". Framing it as though you have a rigorous comparison between them will mislead you into thinking about engineers as if they were fungible, like diesel generators, which is a very silly way to think about a divide-and-conquer field like software engineering where engineers develop different levels of expertise in different things. If you're suggesting there is some underlying factor, like generalised intelligence, I'm not arguing with that! I strongly disagree that factor has anything to do with the number 10, or that engineers fall into discrete 1x and 10x camps, though. I think the phrase "10x engineer" leads to logical fallacies about performance.