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I find these stereotypes very reductive, and having a bit of prejudice. Being unproductive is not a guarantee of having good communication skills, and likewise

by ratww 5y ago

I find these stereotypes very reductive, and having a bit of prejudice. Being unproductive is not a guarantee of having good communication skills, and likewise being being highly-productive is not a guarantee of being bad at communication. If communication is part of the job, in the case of seniors mentoring juniors, for example, then lack of communication skills would definitely prevent someone from being a "10x".

raz32dust 5y ago
Didn't mean to discount communication issues. They are definitely a blocker for growth and impact. The best engineers I worked with had these issues, but worked on them and improved over time to increase their impact.
Sodman 5y ago
I think a big contributor to this "Brilliant asshole" trope is that if you ignore some things like teamwork/communication it's a lot easier to appear to be doing 10x the work. This can manifest in so many ways... Not doing any code reviews? Leaving tests "for somebody else to write"? Refusing to work on legacy code-bases and only working on greenfield projects? Tuning out (or just not even joining) API design meetings so you can work on your own stuff? Bonus points if you have the authority to turn around in a few weeks and make folks re-write the API because you don't like the decisions you ignored - those pesky 1x engineers, eh? There's a bunch of things that fit into this category that can make an engineer seem like they're doing 10x the work, but if you look closer it's frequently only because they're taking shortcuts or pushing more work onto their colleagues. To be clear - I'm not saying 10x engineers don't exist, just that folks with "teamwork issues" who appear to output 10x as many features are frequently not as productive as they seem.
- ratww 5y ago
  Yeah, this is similar to the "10x, but they work twice as many hours a week". It's not someone who's more productive, it's just someone who manages to be more productive by making everyone less.

by ratww 5y ago

raz32dust 5y ago

Didn't mean to discount communication issues. They are definitely a blocker for growth and impact. The best engineers I worked with had these issues, but worked on them and improved over time to increase their impact.

Sodman 5y ago

I think a big contributor to this "Brilliant asshole" trope is that if you ignore some things like teamwork/communication it's a lot easier to appear to be doing 10x the work. This can manifest in so many ways... Not doing any code reviews? Leaving tests "for somebody else to write"? Refusing to work on legacy code-bases and only working on greenfield projects? Tuning out (or just not even joining) API design meetings so you can work on your own stuff? Bonus points if you have the authority to turn around in a few weeks and make folks re-write the API because you don't like the decisions you ignored - those pesky 1x engineers, eh? There's a bunch of things that fit into this category that can make an engineer seem like they're doing 10x the work, but if you look closer it's frequently only because they're taking shortcuts or pushing more work onto their colleagues. To be clear - I'm not saying 10x engineers don't exist, just that folks with "teamwork issues" who appear to output 10x as many features are frequently not as productive as they seem.

ratww 5y ago
Yeah, this is similar to the "10x, but they work twice as many hours a week". It's not someone who's more productive, it's just someone who manages to be more productive by making everyone less.