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Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone kn

• MrPatan 5y ago
  What you cannot say is that there are 0.1x engineers.
  • visarga 5y ago
    Maybe a mix of x0.3 and x3 engineers.
  • jseban 5y ago
    In my experience there are plenty of -10x engineers.
    • zweifuss 5y ago
      1x is defined as the least productive engineer in a team. But I know what you mean. Sometimes a team can be more productive with fewer people.
    • astrange 5y ago
      That's acceptable if they're interns/juniors. If you only hire the best people for the job, you're never going to get any new people.
• deleted 5y ago
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• john_moscow 5y ago
  The corporate culture serves a very specific purpose of lowering the self-esteem of the 10x folks, keeping them at their place doing 10x work at 1x salary until they burn out. This is scalable, predictable, and serves management's interests well. It's just if you happen to be a 10x guy, for the sake of your own sanity, learn how to run a business and get out of the corporate swamp. Nothing else will bring you happiness, believe me.
  • blindmute 5y ago
    The trick is to be a 10x dev and work 0.2x of the time, remotely of course. Everyone thinks you're decent and you get a full salary working 3hrs per day.
  • unobatbayar 5y ago
    Isn't it insane that there are many 10x engineers who have created enormous amount value (creating patents, leading and executing projects, innovating etc.); Yet, the world will only know about the company or the CEO and never the engineers behind it.
    • Nasrudith 5y ago
      How do you expect the world to know about the others? The CEO is public facing by definition of their duties and the charter. Any other public presense from the organization technically falls under marketing of some sort, even teaching useful generic skills for free (say a publisher promoting literacy in third world nations) is in service of this. It requires looking into arcane details to know about the engineers behind it. I mean software, especially media productions often include outright credits but few would remember any but leads usually. Precise attribution would get downright absurd in a pure data sense to give coverage that few care about. Say for just a simple who tightened the screw on this part of the cloth mill during its production run, who made the screw, who farmed the cotton, made the irrigation means.... Replicability and productivity atr what leads to technical obscurity ironically - because the automation and scale means fewer people are even in the position to know what to even ask about the details relative to the numbers served. Thus the knowledge remains arcane. Not many people would even know say, that DRAM tries to minimize capacitance and inductance but it needs some of both to function. Let alone who was involved with what subsection of the chip design and design testing process.
• Dylan16807 5y ago
  "10x" is still treating people like cogs, it's just having cogs of different size.
  • systemvoltage 5y ago
    I like being treated like a cog instead of playing pretend-games of making me feel like a unique flower (but truth is still that I’m a cog). I prefer honesty. I prefer the brutal, unvarnished reality over executive bullshit. A cog means I have specific responsibility and I will make sure I don't hog down the entire machine. I work well with other cogs - we mesh perfectly. Being treated like a daisy with beautiful narrative of lies would eventually lead to a delusional state of mind, dissent and ultimately negative spiraling burnout. Former is peaceful, the latter is deceit.
    • jseban 5y ago
      But one of you really is a daisy, people are not equal, and those daisies are actually what's responsible for most of this machine and it's origins in the first place. Without daisies there will be no place for cogs, the cogs come after the daisies
• 3grdlurker 5y ago
  It’s incredibly reductionist to think that productivity is inherent to an individual when the world is never that simple and there are always a lot of factors involved in any outcome. Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent. It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be said—I’m sure you have the freedom to say that to people if you’re prepared for the consequences. It’s just that it’s such a hasty, unnuanced thing to say, and business decisions should not be made on the basis of rash remarks that aren’t very well thought-out.
  • Swizec 5y ago
    > will stumble under the right circumstances Exactly. Not every task or goal fits every person equally well. A good leader understands this and does their best to find that fit. But it is in my experience not considered okay to talk about this too openly because people get offended. You wouldn’t ask your best engineer to lead a marketing campaign or your best marketer to design your servers. They’re smart and would figure something out eventually, but who gets the task matters.
    • deleted 5y ago
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  • philipswood 5y ago
    I remember finding a site (a design patterns repository page of all things) that explained the nuance of different people having different expected outcomes on different domains well. But despite searching for it for years I haven't been able to find it again - web searches tend to be bad at finding things that you found before, again. Anyway, this was described as the "movie producer pattern" (maybe it was director) I remember it going something like this: As opposed to the factory worker pattern which describes people who perform simple tasks that are straightforward and are easy to learn and perform and are hence interchangeable, it is more accurate to use the movie producer pattern. A producer will have shown his or her abilities in a specific set of movies, each with a certain style and genre, which will lend credence to their ability to perform similar work in a similar genres. It's clear however that the specific director will make a large impact to the final movie and will have a personal touch. For engineers, Susan, who has spent the last decade honing her skills on language VM implementations is expected to be an all around star resource, but would probably be a more trustworthy choice for more VM work as opposed to implementing a graphics engine or database. (In analogy to a director with a string of science fiction movies who might not be the best choice for a romantic comedy)
• ncmncm 5y ago
  Not only are there 10x engineers, I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did not deliver on time, the parent companies would not be paid. At the end of the project, half the code delivered was his. Had he not been on the project, it would not have been completed on time, so no product would have been delivered. [Edit: Thus, it is not really the line count that makes him a 500x engineer.]
  • mrisoli 5y ago
    Assuming you can objectively measure someone like this, either by LoC or delivery times, this is the wrong way to approach any project. Having a 10x engineer(or even worse, a 500x engineer in this alleged case) is a huge risk for the company, should the engineer want to leave or if they are incapacitated in a tragic event, the company is severely handicapped, ideally a so-called 500x engineer should spend less time writing the actual code and instead mentoring/managing others to scale up their knowledge, should the company do this right, they might not deliver on time, but they'll have a much wider array of experts when something breaks or for the next projects, reduces overall company risk and it's more profitable in the long run.
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      Yet, they in fact delivered and got paid, and (pay attention!) would not have delivered and not got paid, otherwise. Risk is speculation about the future. Here we have full benefit of hindsight, and the choice taken was manifestly correct, despite all counterfactual speculation.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). So your 500X engineer knows a 5000X engineer and he wrote as much code as 999 other engineers combined? (That would make him a 999X engineer, FWIW) A 500X engineer (per your measurements) would have to write 500 lines of code every day without fail, while all 500 other engineers in the entire company could only average 1 line of code per day. And the 5000X engineer they know would have to write 5000 lines of code per day while everyone else was only limited to 1 line of code per day. Not just one day, but every single day for six straight months. And all of their managers would have to somehow not notice this disastrous situation for the duration of the project. Come on. I think you've been fed some exaggerations.
• sangnoir 5y ago
  Isn't the "10x" label contingent on engineers being functionally indistinguishably, except some are allegedly 10x more productive? Specialization is what I figure has highest impact on turnaround times in a team setting. Just because an engineer is the most familiar with a component/subsystem - which allows them to make changes to that subsystem faster, doesn't make them an all round 10x engineer.
  • PeterisP 5y ago
    IMHO it's also an useful illustration that being able to replace people is asymmetric. It may be that Bob can do Joe's specialization at half speed, but it's plausible that Joe can't do Bob's specialization properly at all, even after a year of training; so replaceability only works one way. And I have worked with engineers that could do improvements to an unfamiliar component/subsystem faster than the current engineer who is the most familiar with it; i.e. their time of learning+adaptation+implementation was faster than the other persons' implementation alone. And it's not that the other engineer was incompetent, they were quite reasonable.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    It refers to people with the same experience with the system. For example, lets say you have two persons working with a system and have worked with it for two years. One of them is 10x as productive in that system than the other. Neither of them had experience with such systems prior to this, so both were equally productive when they started, but one of them grew much faster and is now 10x the other. Of course if you took those two and put them to work at a new system both would have 0 productivity initially as they learn the new system, but as they grow the differences starts to appear and soon you have a very stark contrast again.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  Even if there aren’t 10x engineers, there are still engineers with different levels of skill and knowledge in different areas. One of the best engineers I ever worked with was terminated (he was a contractor) as he spent his career on the backend, was told he would work on the backend, and they assigned a complicated React feature to him over his objections that he had no knowledge of the framework or frontend dev in general.
• xmprt 5y ago
  I'm "10x" when working on one part of the system that I'm extremely familiar with but "1x" when it comes to other areas. Similarly, I have teammates who are "10x" in those other areas but wouldn't know where to start when it comes to my specialty.
  • grayclhn 5y ago
    You make it sound like you shouldn’t get credit for knowing where you provide the most value and putting yourself in position to be most effective. :)
• wokwokwok 5y ago
  The irony here is that the point of the article isn’t that “10x engineers” do/don’t exist, it’s that “things are more complicated than that”. Assigning arbitrary labels (like 10x engineers…) so it’s “easy to understand” results in over simplified models that lead to faulty decision making based on invalid assumptions. …treating everyone equal is perhaps also a faulty assumption, but it’s easy, and dealing with complex systems is hard. Maybe instead of bitching about equality, which is just a symptom, we should promote using complex models instead of easy trivial ones. …because just using different easy trivial modes is stupid; it won’t get you any better outcomes.
• tomnipotent 5y ago
  A 10x'er is by definition an outlier. It would be absolutely silly for a business to build its planning on the existence of outliers in its staff, unless the company is small (< 20) and that individual is a co-founder or someone you can really rely on. People leave companies for other opportunities even when they like their current job. I have to plan for that, whether it hurts someone's ego or not.
• wyclif 5y ago
  HR didn't care that the person made the company more money than HR saves by doing location adjustments for all international employees combined because HR at the company had no notion of the value of an employee, only the cost, title, level, and location This is common in large, dumb corporations: HR is the Blob. And if you are being recruited by a company that exemplifies that kind of culture, run away, far, far away.
• RNCTX 5y ago
  > But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So we bend over backwards to pretend everyone is equal and capable of the same things in all areas. Then we secretly make sure somehow by magic the truly critical projects are routed to the people and teams with more reliable outcomes. Do you really think that was the motivation? That someone is going to bat for Bob at Alice's expense? Or do you think it more likely that "equality" is another way of saying both Bob and Alice will never threaten someone in management enough to cost them even a minute of sleep on any given night, and that's all management really cares about at the end of the day.
• gonzo41 5y ago
  This is pretty much exactly true. Though I must say being a person who comes in and get plonked on the underperforming team. It'd be really progressive if the Alice character had to take on some fresh blood to share around the knowledge and let new people build rep. Nothing sucks more than being on an underperforming team.
• sneak 5y ago
  > But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So we bend over backwards to pretend everyone is equal and capable of the same things in all areas. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html