16 ms·

10x (engineer, context) pairs

83 points by _ttg 4y ago

throwaway0asd 4y ago
I have found the one distinction of 10x engineers is originality. They can write an original solution to a problem and be done. They don’t need a 1000 different tools to do their job for them, which has second and third order consequences. That also means not having a petrified terror of failure. Yes, there are 10x developers and this is measurable. It’s a progression of the Pareto Distribution. People scared shitless of originality, most people, cannot see this because their life goal is to crush it with internal processes.
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The solution is efficient and lacks unnecessary elements but it is not a novel solution. There are literally two different aspects of intelligence: "lack of brain fog" and creativity. Both aspects of intelligence are different and being strong in one doesn't necessarily mean you're weaker in the other. Lacking brain fog does help with creativity, but creativity is still an independent pillar. Creativity and originality is actually less evident so it's less recognized. 90% of the 10xers you see are just super sharp, and they likely only have average or slightly above average creativity. Someone who has high skill in originality is much harder to recognize and their solutions are so novel that many times the solutions are ridiculed, unrecognized and dismissed. Two famous people who excelled in these different aspects of intelligence are Von Neumann and Einstien. To quote someone who knew them both: "I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original."
  - arcanus 4y ago
    Von Neumann and Einstein's contributions to humanity are incomparable to a 10x engineer. I don't think metrics such as productivity (which 10x crudely approximates) can begin to address this level of innovation. Both unquestionably drove paradigm shifts in scientific and mathematical thinking. It's not measuring the same thing. A 10x engineer might be compared to a full tenured professor with a high citation count. Einstein and Neumann are luminaries of human thought.
    - jollybean 4y ago
      That's not the best way to describe it. A 'Medical Researcher' can be less intelligent than a surgeon, but impact billions of lives. A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time. I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual. A lot of crap startups, might have 10x engineers, but it may make no difference. Or 10x-ers caught up in Corporate Bureaucracy, same result. So this whole mapping 'some project to revenues' really is something else, quite different. Maybe useful, but not in the context we are thinking here.
      - arcanus 4y ago
        > I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual Disagree. My experience is that 10x engineers ARE inherently contextual. When we are talking about the cream of the crop, this requires evaluating impact. You need the opportunity to thrive, which can be deeply contextual. Luck is an element of life. Napoleon would have been nothing without the French revolution. Einstein was fortunate (but capitalized!) that no one had put together Minkowski distance with open questions from michelson-morley. > A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time A brain surgeon can publish the results of a cutting edge surgery, which can save many more lives that a single hand wielding a scalpel. I don't think anyone here is arguing that surgeon's are evaluated on scalpel technique any more than we are comparing programmers by SLOC/day.
    - deltaonezero 4y ago
      Yes they are at the top of their game, but you can certainly map differences from the top end of the spectrum to another part of the spectrum. The difference between Von Neuman and a 10x engineer is vast. However the Delta between Einstien and Von neumann vs. the Delta between a 10x engineer and a regular engineer is a mappable concept. You can do this with the "spectrum" of numbers too. |100010 - 1000000| = 10 | 10 - 0 | = 10 The delta is the same even though the first set of numbers is vastly larger then the second set. Maybe pretending those numbers are IQ points will help illustrate the concept better. I would expect a 10x engineer to realize the above automatically without elaboration... jk.
kleinsch 4y ago
I feel like we discuss this once a week/month and it always breaks down to the same things bc of the number 10. - Yes, some engs write code faster than others. 10x seems really high, so therefore 10x engs don't exist. - Yes, some engs are more productive / pick better problems to solve / force multiply their teammates, but 10x seems pretty high, so 10x engs don't exist. If we hadn't anchored on 10, we wouldn't be disputing that some people are more productive or faster, so I find proving or disproving the 10x eng to be pretty tired. Good article though on the context for why some people are faster or more productive.
- temp8964 4y ago
  Of course 10 can’t be interpreted in a superficial silly way, otherwise many postdocs can be considered as 10x Einstein.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  10x is a big multiplier, but I met plenty of developers that would write 5x the amount of code compared to others, in the same time, and to solve the same problem. Now, is that a good or a bad thing?
- klankbrouwerij 4y ago
  10x seems really high? 10x is just twice as fast
lostdog 4y ago
Yeah, there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment. But I have worked with a few people who were clear 10x engineers. Everything they worked on they did better and faster and cleaner. They could often solve problems that other skilled people couldn't even get started on. Yes, they usually picked important and impactful things to work on, but even when just assigned tasks from the grab bag of team tasks, they were still 10x faster. Somehow these individuals were also 10x nicer too. The only downside of working with them is going home and looking in the mirror and wondering why you can't match their pace. Oh well, I would trade the hit to my ego for getting to work in their codebase any day of the week.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  let's make the twitch stream their workflows :)
  - lostdog 4y ago
    You joke, but I'd love to pair with my current local 10x-er. It will be like bringing my honda civic to the grand prix, but it should be educational at least.
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      :) cute metaphore and known feeling
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  My experience rings true with this. They are very few. In a single organization you may not ever meet one. Another thing that sort of matches your experience is that they are 10x nicer. 10x engineers don't show off at all. They don't need to. What I've been finding is that engineers that think they're smart are probably smart, but they are NEVER 10xers.
- akomtu 4y ago
  Do they also get paid 10x?
GrumpyNl 4y ago
it has to do with the organization to. As soon as they start with Jira and Scrum, your productivity goes down the drain.
- karmakurtisaani 4y ago
  What's wrong with Jira? I've found it very helpful in tracking progress and sharing information for problems involving many people in different teams.
  - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    I've worked at companies that moved quickly using jira and companies that we're bogged down using jira the key difference I've noticed is that the slower the companies move the more obsessed they become with their tools adding piles upon piles of ceremony and requirements I guess jira helps folks do that but that's the case for almost any tool tbh
- mark-r 4y ago
  Yes, but at least you'll have charts to tell you how far down the drain you've gone.
- mbrodersen 4y ago
  Not my experience at all. JIRA is a tool. How you use the tool matters greatly.
temp8964 4y ago
There’s 10x in almost every profession, why is engineering different? If you take physicists with Ph.D. plus 3 years of post-doc as the baseline, of course top physicists are 10x the baseline. And don't interpret the 10x in a superficial silly way which makes post-docs stronger than Einstein. This goes the same in sports, arts, academics, etc. As long as the field has enough depth for growth, the top players can easily be 10x compare to the majority.
- Thiez 4y ago
  You mention sports. I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Aggregate productivity metrics are...difficult. But if one assumes that salaries are roughly proportional to value produced, it's not uncommon to have >10:1 ratio in the top professional tier of a sport, much less the whole of a professional sport. E.g., the NFL has about a 25:1 ratio https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-football-player https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-footbal... MLB has a 700k minimum salary, a 1.1M median salary, a 4.4M mean salary, and a top salaries of $43.3M (that's a more than a 6:1 mean to minimum, and almost a 10:1 maximum to mean ratio, and over 60:1 overall ratio.) https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-study-mlb-salary-down-48-in-2-years-top-100-earn-half/43533631/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-stud... https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/ https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/ > Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits. “Fast” and “strong” measured in ways in which this is true are contributors to value produced, but not the measure of value produced by a player. A wide receiver that is the same in all other ways but runs half as fast as the fastest in the league isn't contributing half as much value.
deltaonefour 4y ago
They must exist. If IQ can range from 80 to 200 and IQ correlates with programming ability then of course there are engineers out there at the far end of the spectrum.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  this is a pretty weak statement. even given such a correlation, what is the scale? how sensitive does programming skill need to be related to IQ to make a 10x engineer sufficiently probable given the population. the real problem though is that IQ and 'programming ability' aren't really well defined.
  - sureglymop 4y ago
    Also the IQ is a pretty narrow measurement for a persons abilities. It might map to 'logical thinking ability' which probably would be related to programming skills. But what if that person has no social skills whatsoever?
  - deltaonefour 4y ago
    IQ is well defined. Programming ability is not. A sign of low IQ is requiring everything to be well defined and scientifically validated in order to move forward in analyzing a problem. Science is slow and has huge limitations. Formally defining complex concepts like "what is life" is also incredibly tedious and so complex that it's often nearly impossible. Do you want to formally define "programming ability" before ever making a statement that intelligence is highly correlated with intelligence? Are we really stuck in some limbo of being unable to come to a fuzzy conclusion on such a simple concept because we can't formally define something? Look at the world around you. What does your gut tell you? Do you really need a scientific study to tell you that walking into a wall is unhealthy? Do you really need a scientific study to tell you intelligence correlates with programming ability? The former is obvious, the latter is also obvious... but not to stupid people. You're absolutely not stupid, but sometimes people end up limiting themselves by trying too hard to be more intelligent.
    - deleted 4y ago
patrickthebold 4y ago
I never understood why this is controversial. I'd say the majority of engineers I've worked with have been 10x engineers. Maybe I've just been incredibly lucky with the teams I've ended up on.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Did it make you skill up faster ? or the opposite ?
- bazoom42 4y ago
  10x compared to what?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deltaonefour 4y ago
I've talked to some of these people in depth and analyzed them. The difference with these people is incredible lack of brain fog. Everything is utterly clear for them. If you're a 10xer then this post characterizes the difference between you and others. It's not that other people are stupider, but there's a sort of brain fog that prevents people from seeing a solution. We sort of have to wander through a fog and look things up to arrive at a solution. What you will find is that this brain fog is independent of creativity. There are many 10xers who aren't that creative.
- dagmx 4y ago
  I think it's about breaking down things into abstracts. Sort of a mental principle component analysis. I'll preface this by saying I've been described as a 10x-er by others my whole career. I do not consider myself one but I've noticed that what people respond to is my ability to break down problem spaces into very small pieces and think about it in the abstract. I also notice that this is what I see in folks that I consider are 10x-ers. It's also not that I think others can't do that. That would be hubris. However I think it takes practice, and practice first requires self reflection. I'm currently mentoring interns and juniors, and I am trying to teach them to approach problems with that kind of thinking. The ones who can shift into breaking things down like that, are able to chew through stuff much faster and cleaner. coincidentally the system architects I've worked with who can think like this are always the strongest at creating scalable solutions and adapting to change.
- sinenomine 4y ago
  I think there is a deeper truth behind this observation. At least we know that smarter people often have larger brains, better control of alpha-rhythm, better fronto-parietal gamma synchronization, longer dendrites. It is plausible to hypothesize that all these differences add up to larger representational capacity and better separation of concept representations, which subjectively could feel like less brain fog while performing demanding mental tasks.
  - deltaonefour 4y ago
    Anecdotally what I have found is 10xers or high IQ people tend to find the solution that makes utter and complete sense. The simplest most efficient solution is the one they come up with. The thing that they miss is the novel solution. The WTF solution that's so left field it changes fundamental understanding of everything. It is even rarer to find these types of people. I believe the "creativity" skill is highly independent of "lack of brain fog" so often times the creative people aren't noticeably more intelligent because they have brain fog and aren't as sharp as the classically intelligent person. They say that Einstein once called his secretary to ask about his address because forgot where he lived.
EliRivers 4y ago
A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance. The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work. Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]
- a_square_peg 4y ago
  Yeah - how this is has been misinterpreted bothers me a lot.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dgb23 4y ago
  Can someone explain why this has been downvoted? It seems like a genuine insight backed by a study.
  - db48x 4y ago
    Technically it’s not backed by a study, but by the personal observations of a pair of engineers who started a consulting firm with the goal of helping other companies succeed at engineering. After doing that for twenty or thirty years, they wrote Peopleware to try to put to paper everything that they had learned. The 10× number was intended to be qualitative rather than quantitative. They openly acknowledge that there is no one single measure of productivity by which all engineers can be measured, but point out that productivity does vary quite a lot from person to person, and that you shouldn’t expect engineers to be fungible. If you have a 10× engineer, you should do your level best not to lose or misuse them; replacing them might involve hiring a lot of people. That includes not just paying them more, but also allowing them to choose what they work on. Salary is an extrinsic motivation, but choosing what to work on is an intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivations trump extrinsic every time. They also take the time to point out that productivity cannot be the only way that you value the people in your engineering teams. For one thing, not everybody in an engineering organization is actually an engineer, and they matter just as much. Even the project and people managers matter a lot to the ultimate success of an engineering project. They also point out that there are very frequently team members who are average or below average engineers, but who still manage to improve every team that they are a member of. They’re the ones with non–engineering skills that they use to bring the team together, get everyone to like each other, build esprit de corps, etc. A lot of advice in the book will seem quaint by today’s standards. For example, there is a whole chapter about offices. It recommends putting no more than two or three people in a single office, and recommends that part of that space be used for communal furniture like couches, coffee tables, bookshelves, etc. Engineers should design those offices themselves, drawing on a pool of real estate and furniture owned by the company. The offices used by an engineering team should all be near each other, but not near the offices of their managers, lest the managers get the idea that they are supposed to be involved in the engineering in any way. Of course today most companies would rather cram hundreds of people into a crowded and noisy open–plan office. On the other hand, it is possible today to do good engineering work from home, and not need offices at all. That wasn’t possible at all in the 80’s when Peopleware was written, let alone the 60’s. But the insights about building high–functioning teams by understanding the individual people that those teams are made of are timeless.
lr4444lr 4y ago
I hate that term "10x", because it assumes there is a known quantifiable metric to find these people. (A skepticism appreciated in this article, though I don't know that it really comes to a clear conclusion either on the "reality".) There are definitely people of a certain caliber who can solve problems others cannot, or way faster, from soup to nuts. But when it comes to a large preexisting code base, solving prohlems in code can be done in different valid ways, which reflects our thinking patterns. Each of these ways then has corollaries about how the next set of problems is better solved in it. When one developer who has been with the company longer, given more clout for some reason, lucked out to be the green fields guy, or maybe really was somewhat better than the others gets to have his thinking pattern become the first principles of the major feature set, he may seem like he's 10x, but I'm not so sure with a different set of initial conditions that it would be so. And I think a lot of the measurements are taken on code bases in this gray area: not solving code interview problems. Then there's the question of speed to full execution vs. maintainability, quality of the solution to deal with the next set of business demands, etc... I'm just not so sure it's that easily measurable.
hardware2win 4y ago
There are 10x just because there are -10 Worked with one and couldnt help him
KaiserPro 4y ago
There are talented engineers all over the place. But, the thing that makes "10x" engineers is rarely their own work, its mostly luck of being in the right place at the right time. The big problem is that most people cannot reliably differentiate a "10x" engineer from a gobshite. The reason why the "myth" is so tedious is that people mistake volume(of code/self aggrandising/speaking in meetings) for being _good_. Just because someone ported code from one language to another, doesn't mean it was useful to the business, or humanity.
wavesounds 4y ago
Why does this 10x meme exist about software engineers and no other profession? It's because the CEOs and VCs who spread this are preying on tech bro macho-ness so they can squeeze as much labor and "productivity" out of us as possible. Let's stop with this juvenile dick measuring contest. We are not machines that have a speed that can be so easily measured like a new CPU in the bosses computer.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  The "meme" exists because many of us have worked with engineers that are shockingly productive, and can write better code, faster than almost everyone else. Code that sticks around for 5-10+ years because it works well. There's nothing juvenile about the observation that some people (and very few) are gifted with an order-of-magnitude stronger programming skills.
angarg12 4y ago
I'm not quite sold on the first bullet point that if the impact of your company/project is 10x, then you are a 10x engineer. Here is my case. In my previous (small) company we achieved a yearly revenue of ~1M eur. I was super proud that I directly contributed 10% of that revenue. My current team in Big Tech generates millions of revenue per month. I could do a small improvement in a week and generate more than 100k in value. Does that mean that I am 100x because my impact is 100x? is it even my achievement at all? It's true that high performing engineers perform high leverage activities, but if we take it at face value then excellent engineers stuck in low value companies/products would be much worse than mediocre engineers working in high impact products. Surely the answer is somewhere in between. Great engineers do the best with what they have available. Sometimes they might influence their environment to increase leverage but this isn't a given.
- fnbr 4y ago
  you’re not making the right comparison. The right comparison would be within the same org. Is there someone on your team that generates $1M per week? Then they’re 10x you. Or does everyone else generate $10k per week? Then you’re 10x them.
  - angarg12 4y ago
    That's exactly my point. The comparison is not mine, but from the article. > but my work at Sendwave led to saving well over 10x more money, because the scale of the product was bigger and the improvements I was making were more important.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
One needs to be careful of that term in general. Once upon a time, I was tasked with creating a new social media api based off of existing work by our "rockstar engineer." This is a guy who spend every single free second reading Code Complete and Code and Programming Pearls and seemed to have injected Design Patterns directly into his veins. The last time he created a new API based off of his existing work, it took him about 2 days. I had zero experience with it, so it took me a little over 3. He was a person who was very proud of his work and declared that there was no reason for me to take that long to implement the new code. The code review process at the company has a lot to be desired, and he being the "rockstar," basically got his code handwaved through by our CTO, who was filling in as our last manager had taken another position. Deciding I had enough, I went to the new manager who had no inkling of this dev's reputation and asked him to code review the original commit to the base social API with me for real this time. I asked him to keep in mind that other devs were going to have to build their work based off of this base system. It was a convoluted, entirely over-engineered pile of crap. A wankfest masquerading as code. See, I read and was familiar with all of the books that sat proudly displayed in his cubicle. But there's a time and a place for everything, and the only 10x about this guy was the amount of unnecessary code he produced in order to do something as simple as interfacing with Facebook.
jollybean 4y ago
Often overlooked is just the breadth of experience and insight aka 'Technical Wisdom'. It took 5 years of various clusterf**s with Unicode, but now whenever I approach it, I have an intuition for the cost of string manipulation, UTF8 v 16, what's pragmatic, what is needed, what is 'overdoing it'. It's like building a deck - after you build 100 of them 'all the little details' become instinct. So if you can do that across all sorts of technologies ... then you just walk through stuff like butter. Whenever I see someone whip through something, I'm not amazed so much by talent or genius, but how they 'know so much'. It's like the academic who's read literally 1000 books and remembers a lot of it. Whether they are 10x or not really depends. Some architectural decisions make a 10x difference. Some business related decisions also make a difference. Sometimes it's not apparent until later, or never apparent. And sometimes it doesn't matter that much. Finally - I'll say that 'speed of execution' is not remotely the issue. If someone can saunter along at a reasonable pace but actually produce the 'correct thing' - that's worth it's weight in gold right there.
stephc_int13 4y ago
The difference between exceptional and average programmers is not something special. It can been seen in all creative fields. The important factor is not speed but output. Some people can do things that almost everyone else would consider impossible. Having even a single one of those in your company can be the most important factor of success. Fabrice Bellard https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ and Justine Tunney https://justine.lol/ https://justine.lol/ are good examples of this kind of people, but there are of course many others.
khazhoux 4y ago
I contend that the only reason their existence is debated or controversial, is because the concept hurts the pride of those who like to think of themselves as best-of-the-best engineers, but are afraid they're really not. I've worked with 10x engineers maybe 2-3 times in 20 years. One single-handedly wrote 85% of <extremely popular and complex app you've used> and another wrote most of the internal libraries at <company you've heard of>. They would regularly take tasks that most people would take a month+ to do, and just knock it out in a couple of days -- over and over.
- asdffdsa 4y ago
  The one idea I don't like surrounding 10x engineers is the rhetoric by startups or companies around hiring is "we're only looking for rockstars and 10x engineers", which naturally denigrates the majority of (1x) engineers. This launches a broader discussion of whether success in business manifests by scaling up or scaling out, and I tend to be a proponent of Locke than Hobbes. So the controversial nature comes from the implication that most of the workforce (1x engineers like myself) are worthless and not worth hiring, and also the hubris of thinking a 1x company can hire and retain a/only 10x engineers (these same startups/companies usually offer a 1x or less compensation package). If you think I'm wrong, then fire 90% of your engineers and see where that gets you; that would be an interesting result if productivity increased! I think this is separate from mere jealousy or denial; 10x engineers definitely do exist and I look up to them for inspiration and example.
  - khazhoux 4y ago
    > The one idea I don't like about 10x engineers is the rhetoric by startups or companies around hiring is "we're only looking for rockstars and 10x engineers" Completely agree. That's recruiting/marketing bullshit. They're trying to appeal to people's egos, but probably have the opposite effect, as you say. Also, I doubt one could actually recognize these top-tier engineers, at least not in today's standard interviews. But... I did actually job-interview a 10x'er for a startup years ago. It wasn't a standard interview but rather a long, casual lunch (he was a friend-of-a-friend). After two hours of talking about engineering/coding/etc, I started to suspect: "Huh, I think this guy might be a better than me." What I didn't realize is just how much better than me he would turn out to be -- it was amazing and a joy to learn from him.
mathgladiator 4y ago
Comparison is the thief of joy. The notion of context is exceptionally important because it relates to Price's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price ). You see this in big tech like crazy where most engineers are trying to get a few things done in a massive code base, and then many decisions come from on-high via principal engineers. As a former senior principal engineer, I've been there, seen it, and enjoyed it. The question that haunted me was how to help more people grow into higher roles, and the problem is a lack of scope. This lack of scope is oppressive as there are only so many creative needs and the volume of toil is hard to avoid. So, yes, if you have the right context, then you can do great. However, we also can't dismiss intelligence, memory, or experience as multipliers. The unfortunate fact is that these are not uniformly shared, so there are a bunch of people talking over each other. Worst yet, we don't have a common way of thinking about experience, and here Price's Law reveals an ugly truth: deep experience is rare.
mathgladiator 4y ago
The title of the article is "10x (engineer, context) pairs" and the submitted title is... clickbait-y.
- dang 4y ago
  Yes. We've reverted the title now (submitted title was "On the myth versus reality of ten-x engineers"). "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
eugenhotaj 4y ago
Just take a look at big tech salaries on levels.fyi. Very senior engineers (L8/L9) easily make 10x the salary of entry to mid-level engineers (L3/L4/L5). For a lot of tech companies, L5 is a terminal level meaning most engineers will spend the rest of their careers there. Clearly the market thinks 10x engineers exist.
andrew_ 4y ago
"10x engineer" is a signpost that means "run away fast" if I see it in job posts or from leadership.
- dgb23 4y ago
  Because they want you to do 10x the work for 0.8x the pay?
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    bingo. Kable, a new YC company, keeps posting jobs for 10x engineers. To their credit they list salary ranges, but it's towards the middle.
TheBigSalad 4y ago
Ffs, the claim is that the great engineers are 10x better than the worst engineers. Stop asking if 10x engineers exist and ask if some engineers are only 1x of the best. I've worked with people who spend months on a story that I can do in 3 days. I've seen engineers so bad that they provide negative value with all the time they suck from others. 10x is an understatement.
KenoFischer 4y ago
I'm not sure I really "got distracted" by building those tools. Building the tools was kind of the point for me and the class was simply a good way to focus the tools on a concrete effort. I acknowledge that it ended up occasionally getting me in trouble when forward progress on class projects was stalled on seemingly unrelated tooling and I got an appropriate admonition about it at the end of the year from the professor, but on the other hand, doing the class this way was way more impactful long-term. A lot of that tooling is still in active use across the Julia ecosystem, while the actual code it was used for at the time never got touched again after the end of the semester. That's pretty much my general philosophy when it comes to writing software though. Whenever possible, figure out what tooling would have made the task easy and then build that and solve the problem simultaneously. You're probably gonna have to throw away the latter code, but at least the next time it'll be easier, because you now have the tooling. Even better if you happen to be in a position like mine where you already build tools for others, because that way other people will end up benefiting too. Anyway, does it still occasionally get me in trouble? Yes. I not infrequently end up in situations where the software is essentially done, but I have to write a compiler pass to make it actually work, because I decided to write the code in a way that I thought it should be written, rather than a way that would be performant out of the box. But hey, at least I'm aware of it (https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1529814861693259777 https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1529814861693259777) ;).
FunnyBadger 4y ago
Dealing with this right now actually. We (a start-up) got bought. The product was split into two teams - we originally did BOTH HW and SW. Their HW team was pretty good so we let them do the HW and we did the SW. The problem can from the HW actually being HW + FW (a form of SW) and turns out they are mediocre at best FW and digital design and that's become a problem (we have to hook into what they are doing). We (the original startup crew) finally figured out what the problem was: their commitment to ANYTHING (our HW project but also every other product they've ever worked on) is exactly the same as how most people treat school and homework, namely, how much can get away with NOT thinking and doing about it and still get a passing grade. They can't be "fixed" because that's how deep the problem is: they've been trained for this attitude since they were children and they wouldn't know how to break out if their lives depended on it; they are not dumb or low-IQ. But they've been trained to achieve the lowest-common-denominator of anything they design or engineer. This has never been how any of us have approached anything in life. For us, it's: 1. Do the best job regardless of what you could get away with 2. Focus on the big picture and little picture integration 3. Know who actually makes the product a success: the customer and the market Significantly IMO I went to elite schools on merit rather than legacy/money while my co-founder was home-schooled and didn't actually finish his BS but he has more drive and commitment than 99 out of 100 BS EE or CS degree holders I've ever met or worked with. Most people mouth the words but either don't actually know what they mean or do not mean what they are saying when they say them. This may not be sufficient but I think it's a necessary difference between normie engineers and 10x engineers.
gamblor956 4y ago
The flipside of the 10x engineer is the 1/10 engineer, generally "codemonkeys" that learned to "program" at a bootcamp. Their skills are limited to the particular framework and tools they used at their bootcamp, and they have less ability to learn new tools and languages than the average designer or marketing person. Despite their poor skills, 1/10 engineers generally think that they are the best, smartest, and most productive programmers at whatever company is unfortunate/dumb enough to employ them. Mostly because they take so much time to do everything, and they think that time spent is equivalent to productivity. But their code is so brittle, it can only handle limited scenarios and tends to fall apart under load. The 1/10 engineers frequently get into arguments related to tech issues into which they have no knowledge or insight, because they assume that being able to code makes them omniscient gods (this afflictions also affects many 1x programmers as well). 1/10 engineers are the reason so many LA tech companies (my employer included) no longer hire bootcamp graduates.
someweirdperson 4y ago
It is just a matter of the frame of reference. In an organization with a large number of 0.1x developers, skilled developers may look like 10x. The 0.1x ones don't really understand the problem they are working on, nor can they write even a few lines of coherent code, often with only a minimalistic understanding of the language they are using. Spotting them is easy: Watching them use the editor of their choice to work on code feels like watching a toddler learning to walk. Different organizations happen to hire different kind of people. For some organizations hiring skilled developers is a matter of luck. The skilled ones they manage to hire are outliers, easily perceived as 10x. Other organization manage to hire mostly skilled developers and PIP the rest. In that kind of environment 10x does not exist. That's the perfect base for an argument. Depending on the individuals background it is very obvious that 10x exists / does not exist.
eventhorizonpl 4y ago
I do not doubt that there are 10/ programmers. Programmers that are just lazy slackers.
tjs8rj 4y ago
I have no idea why this is so contentious in the engineering discipline like it’s some unique question. When you were in school, weren’t their students just far more capable than others? When you look at sports, aren’t there just players far more capable than everyone else (any pro player vs any non pro)? When you look at art, aren’t there just artists so much better than others (professional artists vs a hobbyist)? Salespersons? Dog trainers? Snowboarders? Etc Every discipline has a bell curve of skill, and there are engineers who are just significantly better than others and it’s not even close (like any profession). There are limits, but software engineering isn’t anything special here where the idea of outliers warrants this much controversy. Yes there are “10x engineers”, obviously, because every domain has skill levels spanning magnitudes. It seems like the only thing preventing recognition of this fact is ego (and to be clear, I don’t think I’m a 10x engineer at all)
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  Yeah I'm happy with my little toys and I've hacked some cool things together quickly, but I've known people who could really do 10x the work just because it was that easy for them. They knew what the problem was immediately and how to fix it well. Working on their code was (and, lucky me, is) a dream.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
  i think i was a 10x engineer at my last job, but the bar was much lower. now I'm just average. it's all relative
jerDev 4y ago
This is very subjective. ( obviously ) You can go 10x speed in a direction that is pointless. Not all work equates to value. The best product is the simplest that makes the most money. Duct tape and hacks make money. There is zero value in going beyond that. Over-engineering is an epidemic. “cool” means nothing. Engineering is a tool for a job, it’s not a product in itself. If your internal parser fails when you see a comment in code with bad grammar and you strive to fix it, that is you being neurotic not useful. Engineers love to build kingdoms in the details that nobody gives a fuck about.
dasil003 4y ago
The concept of the "10x engineer" has vastly outlived its usefulness. Remember, it originally was a response to clueless non-technical management who thought that programmers were completely fungible—the type of thinking that led to early waves of offshoring based on headcount costs, and a willful ignorance that the details that technical staff spend their time working on actually matter. But once you get past the pointy-hairs, all this framing does is set up a falsely quantitative comparison between broad swathes of engineers whose work can not and should not be compared in this way. Is it really any surprise that a meme created for the bean counters is going to draw ire and vitriol from passionate, diligent and opinionated software professionals? There is absolutely no point in the general debate about what "10x engineer" is (or whether it really exists). Yes, people have vastly different skills. Yes, there are things which some engineers can do which others could never do. Yes, there are Dunning-Kruger cases without the chops, humility or awareness to acknowledge this. Trying to quantify and strictly define those things though? Pointless.
jerDev 4y ago
It benefits nobody to be a 10x engineer unless they are making 10x salary. In fact, once you have the job, the absolute best play is to do as little as possible and not get fired. We are businesses ourselves, don’t forget that. You work for money, and once you have the money, there is no reason to ever give more value than you are getting. Want more money? Study for an interview and then return to your minimal effort process. Believing that you need to give more is the company winning. Treat yourself like a shrewd startup business.
a_square_peg 4y ago
Software industry would really benefit once we grow out of discussing this 10x notion - it's the same level of juvenile (high-school/undergrad) discussion as whether geniuses and gifted people really exist (they do) but in professional settings, it matters very little.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
renewiltord 4y ago
What makes an engineer 10x is if he does shit or he talks on the internet about the absence of 10x engineers.
ncmncm 4y ago
I know an objectively-measured 500x engineer. On a 6-month crash project with 1000 engineers assigned, at the end, fully half the code delivered was his. You can't get any more objective than that. To be clear: this was a project where, if not delivered on the 6-month mark, the company would not be paid. It is hard to see how, without his work, the project could have delivered on time. I have worked with a few others of similar ability. I have never had a bad experience with one.
- MaxBarraclough 4y ago
  It may be that this developer really did single-handedly save the day, but: > half the code delivered was his. You can't get any more objective than that. Counting lines of code is a famously ineffective way to measure productivity. It encourages low-density code style, and encourages working on easy development tasks. It also encourages prioritising velocity over quality, although in many contexts that may be what you want.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    It can be quite effective after the fact. Our 500x engineer had no reason to pad, and every reason to avoid wasting time writing anything nonfunctional. In the event, he assigned two-week tasks, and where not done on time he would do them himself over the weekend. During the two weeks, he would do up to ten such tasks, despite that he reserved the harder tasks for himself.
woopwoop24 4y ago
i mean there are so many factors to this equation, writing code is the least of my problems. i try to focus more on enabling my teammates to avoid making bigger mistakes and growing them to be decent engineers, rather than optimizing my own work by a few percent. After all software engineering is a team effort for most of the times. What does it matter if i am 10x more productive and crank out all the solutions and code and the rest are all juniors and i have a bus factor of 1? sometime it feels like people have to show-off or be the shining knights how save the day and want to be padded on the back constantly for that.

83 points by _ttg 4y ago

I have found the one distinction of 10x engineers is originality. They can write an original solution to a problem and be done. They don’t need a 1000 different tools to do their job for them, which has second and third order consequences. That also means not having a petrified terror of failure. Yes, there are 10x developers and this is measurable. It’s a progression of the Pareto Distribution. People scared shitless of originality, most people, cannot see this because their life goal is to crush it with internal processes.

deltaonefour 4y ago
I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The solution is efficient and lacks unnecessary elements but it is not a novel solution. There are literally two different aspects of intelligence: "lack of brain fog" and creativity. Both aspects of intelligence are different and being strong in one doesn't necessarily mean you're weaker in the other. Lacking brain fog does help with creativity, but creativity is still an independent pillar. Creativity and originality is actually less evident so it's less recognized. 90% of the 10xers you see are just super sharp, and they likely only have average or slightly above average creativity. Someone who has high skill in originality is much harder to recognize and their solutions are so novel that many times the solutions are ridiculed, unrecognized and dismissed. Two famous people who excelled in these different aspects of intelligence are Von Neumann and Einstien. To quote someone who knew them both: "I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed. But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original."
- arcanus 4y ago
  Von Neumann and Einstein's contributions to humanity are incomparable to a 10x engineer. I don't think metrics such as productivity (which 10x crudely approximates) can begin to address this level of innovation. Both unquestionably drove paradigm shifts in scientific and mathematical thinking. It's not measuring the same thing. A 10x engineer might be compared to a full tenured professor with a high citation count. Einstein and Neumann are luminaries of human thought.
  - jollybean 4y ago
    That's not the best way to describe it. A 'Medical Researcher' can be less intelligent than a surgeon, but impact billions of lives. A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time. I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual. A lot of crap startups, might have 10x engineers, but it may make no difference. Or 10x-ers caught up in Corporate Bureaucracy, same result. So this whole mapping 'some project to revenues' really is something else, quite different. Maybe useful, but not in the context we are thinking here.
    - arcanus 4y ago
      > I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual Disagree. My experience is that 10x engineers ARE inherently contextual. When we are talking about the cream of the crop, this requires evaluating impact. You need the opportunity to thrive, which can be deeply contextual. Luck is an element of life. Napoleon would have been nothing without the French revolution. Einstein was fortunate (but capitalized!) that no one had put together Minkowski distance with open questions from michelson-morley. > A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time A brain surgeon can publish the results of a cutting edge surgery, which can save many more lives that a single hand wielding a scalpel. I don't think anyone here is arguing that surgeon's are evaluated on scalpel technique any more than we are comparing programmers by SLOC/day.
  - deltaonezero 4y ago
    Yes they are at the top of their game, but you can certainly map differences from the top end of the spectrum to another part of the spectrum. The difference between Von Neuman and a 10x engineer is vast. However the Delta between Einstien and Von neumann vs. the Delta between a 10x engineer and a regular engineer is a mappable concept. You can do this with the "spectrum" of numbers too. |100010 - 1000000| = 10 | 10 - 0 | = 10 The delta is the same even though the first set of numbers is vastly larger then the second set. Maybe pretending those numbers are IQ points will help illustrate the concept better. I would expect a 10x engineer to realize the above automatically without elaboration... jk.

kleinsch 4y ago

I feel like we discuss this once a week/month and it always breaks down to the same things bc of the number 10. - Yes, some engs write code faster than others. 10x seems really high, so therefore 10x engs don't exist. - Yes, some engs are more productive / pick better problems to solve / force multiply their teammates, but 10x seems pretty high, so 10x engs don't exist. If we hadn't anchored on 10, we wouldn't be disputing that some people are more productive or faster, so I find proving or disproving the 10x eng to be pretty tired. Good article though on the context for why some people are faster or more productive.

temp8964 4y ago
Of course 10 can’t be interpreted in a superficial silly way, otherwise many postdocs can be considered as 10x Einstein.
goodpoint 4y ago
10x is a big multiplier, but I met plenty of developers that would write 5x the amount of code compared to others, in the same time, and to solve the same problem. Now, is that a good or a bad thing?
klankbrouwerij 4y ago
10x seems really high? 10x is just twice as fast

lostdog 4y ago

Yeah, there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment. But I have worked with a few people who were clear 10x engineers. Everything they worked on they did better and faster and cleaner. They could often solve problems that other skilled people couldn't even get started on. Yes, they usually picked important and impactful things to work on, but even when just assigned tasks from the grab bag of team tasks, they were still 10x faster. Somehow these individuals were also 10x nicer too. The only downside of working with them is going home and looking in the mirror and wondering why you can't match their pace. Oh well, I would trade the hit to my ego for getting to work in their codebase any day of the week.

agumonkey 4y ago
let's make the twitch stream their workflows :)
- lostdog 4y ago
  You joke, but I'd love to pair with my current local 10x-er. It will be like bringing my honda civic to the grand prix, but it should be educational at least.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    :) cute metaphore and known feeling
deltaonefour 4y ago
My experience rings true with this. They are very few. In a single organization you may not ever meet one. Another thing that sort of matches your experience is that they are 10x nicer. 10x engineers don't show off at all. They don't need to. What I've been finding is that engineers that think they're smart are probably smart, but they are NEVER 10xers.
akomtu 4y ago
Do they also get paid 10x?

GrumpyNl 4y ago

it has to do with the organization to. As soon as they start with Jira and Scrum, your productivity goes down the drain.

karmakurtisaani 4y ago
What's wrong with Jira? I've found it very helpful in tracking progress and sharing information for problems involving many people in different teams.
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  I've worked at companies that moved quickly using jira and companies that we're bogged down using jira the key difference I've noticed is that the slower the companies move the more obsessed they become with their tools adding piles upon piles of ceremony and requirements I guess jira helps folks do that but that's the case for almost any tool tbh
mark-r 4y ago
Yes, but at least you'll have charts to tell you how far down the drain you've gone.
mbrodersen 4y ago
Not my experience at all. JIRA is a tool. How you use the tool matters greatly.

temp8964 4y ago

There’s 10x in almost every profession, why is engineering different? If you take physicists with Ph.D. plus 3 years of post-doc as the baseline, of course top physicists are 10x the baseline. And don't interpret the 10x in a superficial silly way which makes post-docs stronger than Einstein. This goes the same in sports, arts, academics, etc. As long as the field has enough depth for growth, the top players can easily be 10x compare to the majority.

Thiez 4y ago
You mention sports. I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Aggregate productivity metrics are...difficult. But if one assumes that salaries are roughly proportional to value produced, it's not uncommon to have >10:1 ratio in the top professional tier of a sport, much less the whole of a professional sport. E.g., the NFL has about a 25:1 ratio https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-football-player https://www.comparably.com/salaries/salaries-for-nfl-footbal... MLB has a 700k minimum salary, a 1.1M median salary, a 4.4M mean salary, and a top salaries of $43.3M (that's a more than a 6:1 mean to minimum, and almost a 10:1 maximum to mean ratio, and over 60:1 overall ratio.) https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Minimum_salary https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-study-mlb-salary-down-48-in-2-years-top-100-earn-half/43533631/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2021/04/16/ap-stud... https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/ https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/average/ > Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits. “Fast” and “strong” measured in ways in which this is true are contributors to value produced, but not the measure of value produced by a player. A wide receiver that is the same in all other ways but runs half as fast as the fastest in the league isn't contributing half as much value.

deltaonefour 4y ago

They must exist. If IQ can range from 80 to 200 and IQ correlates with programming ability then of course there are engineers out there at the far end of the spectrum.

convolvatron 4y ago
this is a pretty weak statement. even given such a correlation, what is the scale? how sensitive does programming skill need to be related to IQ to make a 10x engineer sufficiently probable given the population. the real problem though is that IQ and 'programming ability' aren't really well defined.
- sureglymop 4y ago
  Also the IQ is a pretty narrow measurement for a persons abilities. It might map to 'logical thinking ability' which probably would be related to programming skills. But what if that person has no social skills whatsoever?
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  IQ is well defined. Programming ability is not. A sign of low IQ is requiring everything to be well defined and scientifically validated in order to move forward in analyzing a problem. Science is slow and has huge limitations. Formally defining complex concepts like "what is life" is also incredibly tedious and so complex that it's often nearly impossible. Do you want to formally define "programming ability" before ever making a statement that intelligence is highly correlated with intelligence? Are we really stuck in some limbo of being unable to come to a fuzzy conclusion on such a simple concept because we can't formally define something? Look at the world around you. What does your gut tell you? Do you really need a scientific study to tell you that walking into a wall is unhealthy? Do you really need a scientific study to tell you intelligence correlates with programming ability? The former is obvious, the latter is also obvious... but not to stupid people. You're absolutely not stupid, but sometimes people end up limiting themselves by trying too hard to be more intelligent.
  - deleted 4y ago

patrickthebold 4y ago

I never understood why this is controversial. I'd say the majority of engineers I've worked with have been 10x engineers. Maybe I've just been incredibly lucky with the teams I've ended up on.

agumonkey 4y ago
Did it make you skill up faster ? or the opposite ?
bazoom42 4y ago
10x compared to what?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deltaonefour 4y ago

I've talked to some of these people in depth and analyzed them. The difference with these people is incredible lack of brain fog. Everything is utterly clear for them. If you're a 10xer then this post characterizes the difference between you and others. It's not that other people are stupider, but there's a sort of brain fog that prevents people from seeing a solution. We sort of have to wander through a fog and look things up to arrive at a solution. What you will find is that this brain fog is independent of creativity. There are many 10xers who aren't that creative.

dagmx 4y ago
I think it's about breaking down things into abstracts. Sort of a mental principle component analysis. I'll preface this by saying I've been described as a 10x-er by others my whole career. I do not consider myself one but I've noticed that what people respond to is my ability to break down problem spaces into very small pieces and think about it in the abstract. I also notice that this is what I see in folks that I consider are 10x-ers. It's also not that I think others can't do that. That would be hubris. However I think it takes practice, and practice first requires self reflection. I'm currently mentoring interns and juniors, and I am trying to teach them to approach problems with that kind of thinking. The ones who can shift into breaking things down like that, are able to chew through stuff much faster and cleaner. coincidentally the system architects I've worked with who can think like this are always the strongest at creating scalable solutions and adapting to change.
sinenomine 4y ago
I think there is a deeper truth behind this observation. At least we know that smarter people often have larger brains, better control of alpha-rhythm, better fronto-parietal gamma synchronization, longer dendrites. It is plausible to hypothesize that all these differences add up to larger representational capacity and better separation of concept representations, which subjectively could feel like less brain fog while performing demanding mental tasks.
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  Anecdotally what I have found is 10xers or high IQ people tend to find the solution that makes utter and complete sense. The simplest most efficient solution is the one they come up with. The thing that they miss is the novel solution. The WTF solution that's so left field it changes fundamental understanding of everything. It is even rarer to find these types of people. I believe the "creativity" skill is highly independent of "lack of brain fog" so often times the creative people aren't noticeably more intelligent because they have brain fog and aren't as sharp as the classically intelligent person. They say that Einstein once called his secretary to ask about his address because forgot where he lived.

EliRivers 4y ago

A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance. The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work. Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

a_square_peg 4y ago
Yeah - how this is has been misinterpreted bothers me a lot.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dgb23 4y ago
Can someone explain why this has been downvoted? It seems like a genuine insight backed by a study.
- db48x 4y ago
  Technically it’s not backed by a study, but by the personal observations of a pair of engineers who started a consulting firm with the goal of helping other companies succeed at engineering. After doing that for twenty or thirty years, they wrote Peopleware to try to put to paper everything that they had learned. The 10× number was intended to be qualitative rather than quantitative. They openly acknowledge that there is no one single measure of productivity by which all engineers can be measured, but point out that productivity does vary quite a lot from person to person, and that you shouldn’t expect engineers to be fungible. If you have a 10× engineer, you should do your level best not to lose or misuse them; replacing them might involve hiring a lot of people. That includes not just paying them more, but also allowing them to choose what they work on. Salary is an extrinsic motivation, but choosing what to work on is an intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivations trump extrinsic every time. They also take the time to point out that productivity cannot be the only way that you value the people in your engineering teams. For one thing, not everybody in an engineering organization is actually an engineer, and they matter just as much. Even the project and people managers matter a lot to the ultimate success of an engineering project. They also point out that there are very frequently team members who are average or below average engineers, but who still manage to improve every team that they are a member of. They’re the ones with non–engineering skills that they use to bring the team together, get everyone to like each other, build esprit de corps, etc. A lot of advice in the book will seem quaint by today’s standards. For example, there is a whole chapter about offices. It recommends putting no more than two or three people in a single office, and recommends that part of that space be used for communal furniture like couches, coffee tables, bookshelves, etc. Engineers should design those offices themselves, drawing on a pool of real estate and furniture owned by the company. The offices used by an engineering team should all be near each other, but not near the offices of their managers, lest the managers get the idea that they are supposed to be involved in the engineering in any way. Of course today most companies would rather cram hundreds of people into a crowded and noisy open–plan office. On the other hand, it is possible today to do good engineering work from home, and not need offices at all. That wasn’t possible at all in the 80’s when Peopleware was written, let alone the 60’s. But the insights about building high–functioning teams by understanding the individual people that those teams are made of are timeless.

lr4444lr 4y ago

I hate that term "10x", because it assumes there is a known quantifiable metric to find these people. (A skepticism appreciated in this article, though I don't know that it really comes to a clear conclusion either on the "reality".) There are definitely people of a certain caliber who can solve problems others cannot, or way faster, from soup to nuts. But when it comes to a large preexisting code base, solving prohlems in code can be done in different valid ways, which reflects our thinking patterns. Each of these ways then has corollaries about how the next set of problems is better solved in it. When one developer who has been with the company longer, given more clout for some reason, lucked out to be the green fields guy, or maybe really was somewhat better than the others gets to have his thinking pattern become the first principles of the major feature set, he may seem like he's 10x, but I'm not so sure with a different set of initial conditions that it would be so. And I think a lot of the measurements are taken on code bases in this gray area: not solving code interview problems. Then there's the question of speed to full execution vs. maintainability, quality of the solution to deal with the next set of business demands, etc... I'm just not so sure it's that easily measurable.

hardware2win 4y ago

There are 10x just because there are -10 Worked with one and couldnt help him

KaiserPro 4y ago

There are talented engineers all over the place. But, the thing that makes "10x" engineers is rarely their own work, its mostly luck of being in the right place at the right time. The big problem is that most people cannot reliably differentiate a "10x" engineer from a gobshite. The reason why the "myth" is so tedious is that people mistake volume(of code/self aggrandising/speaking in meetings) for being _good_. Just because someone ported code from one language to another, doesn't mean it was useful to the business, or humanity.

wavesounds 4y ago

Why does this 10x meme exist about software engineers and no other profession? It's because the CEOs and VCs who spread this are preying on tech bro macho-ness so they can squeeze as much labor and "productivity" out of us as possible. Let's stop with this juvenile dick measuring contest. We are not machines that have a speed that can be so easily measured like a new CPU in the bosses computer.

khazhoux 4y ago
The "meme" exists because many of us have worked with engineers that are shockingly productive, and can write better code, faster than almost everyone else. Code that sticks around for 5-10+ years because it works well. There's nothing juvenile about the observation that some people (and very few) are gifted with an order-of-magnitude stronger programming skills.

angarg12 4y ago

I'm not quite sold on the first bullet point that if the impact of your company/project is 10x, then you are a 10x engineer. Here is my case. In my previous (small) company we achieved a yearly revenue of ~1M eur. I was super proud that I directly contributed 10% of that revenue. My current team in Big Tech generates millions of revenue per month. I could do a small improvement in a week and generate more than 100k in value. Does that mean that I am 100x because my impact is 100x? is it even my achievement at all? It's true that high performing engineers perform high leverage activities, but if we take it at face value then excellent engineers stuck in low value companies/products would be much worse than mediocre engineers working in high impact products. Surely the answer is somewhere in between. Great engineers do the best with what they have available. Sometimes they might influence their environment to increase leverage but this isn't a given.

fnbr 4y ago
you’re not making the right comparison. The right comparison would be within the same org. Is there someone on your team that generates $1M per week? Then they’re 10x you. Or does everyone else generate $10k per week? Then you’re 10x them.
- angarg12 4y ago
  That's exactly my point. The comparison is not mine, but from the article. > but my work at Sendwave led to saving well over 10x more money, because the scale of the product was bigger and the improvements I was making were more important.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

One needs to be careful of that term in general. Once upon a time, I was tasked with creating a new social media api based off of existing work by our "rockstar engineer." This is a guy who spend every single free second reading Code Complete and Code and Programming Pearls and seemed to have injected Design Patterns directly into his veins. The last time he created a new API based off of his existing work, it took him about 2 days. I had zero experience with it, so it took me a little over 3. He was a person who was very proud of his work and declared that there was no reason for me to take that long to implement the new code. The code review process at the company has a lot to be desired, and he being the "rockstar," basically got his code handwaved through by our CTO, who was filling in as our last manager had taken another position. Deciding I had enough, I went to the new manager who had no inkling of this dev's reputation and asked him to code review the original commit to the base social API with me for real this time. I asked him to keep in mind that other devs were going to have to build their work based off of this base system. It was a convoluted, entirely over-engineered pile of crap. A wankfest masquerading as code. See, I read and was familiar with all of the books that sat proudly displayed in his cubicle. But there's a time and a place for everything, and the only 10x about this guy was the amount of unnecessary code he produced in order to do something as simple as interfacing with Facebook.

jollybean 4y ago

Often overlooked is just the breadth of experience and insight aka 'Technical Wisdom'. It took 5 years of various clusterf**s with Unicode, but now whenever I approach it, I have an intuition for the cost of string manipulation, UTF8 v 16, what's pragmatic, what is needed, what is 'overdoing it'. It's like building a deck - after you build 100 of them 'all the little details' become instinct. So if you can do that across all sorts of technologies ... then you just walk through stuff like butter. Whenever I see someone whip through something, I'm not amazed so much by talent or genius, but how they 'know so much'. It's like the academic who's read literally 1000 books and remembers a lot of it. Whether they are 10x or not really depends. Some architectural decisions make a 10x difference. Some business related decisions also make a difference. Sometimes it's not apparent until later, or never apparent. And sometimes it doesn't matter that much. Finally - I'll say that 'speed of execution' is not remotely the issue. If someone can saunter along at a reasonable pace but actually produce the 'correct thing' - that's worth it's weight in gold right there.

stephc_int13 4y ago

The difference between exceptional and average programmers is not something special. It can been seen in all creative fields. The important factor is not speed but output. Some people can do things that almost everyone else would consider impossible. Having even a single one of those in your company can be the most important factor of success. Fabrice Bellard https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ and Justine Tunney https://justine.lol/ https://justine.lol/ are good examples of this kind of people, but there are of course many others.

khazhoux 4y ago

I contend that the only reason their existence is debated or controversial, is because the concept hurts the pride of those who like to think of themselves as best-of-the-best engineers, but are afraid they're really not. I've worked with 10x engineers maybe 2-3 times in 20 years. One single-handedly wrote 85% of <extremely popular and complex app you've used> and another wrote most of the internal libraries at <company you've heard of>. They would regularly take tasks that most people would take a month+ to do, and just knock it out in a couple of days -- over and over.

asdffdsa 4y ago
The one idea I don't like surrounding 10x engineers is the rhetoric by startups or companies around hiring is "we're only looking for rockstars and 10x engineers", which naturally denigrates the majority of (1x) engineers. This launches a broader discussion of whether success in business manifests by scaling up or scaling out, and I tend to be a proponent of Locke than Hobbes. So the controversial nature comes from the implication that most of the workforce (1x engineers like myself) are worthless and not worth hiring, and also the hubris of thinking a 1x company can hire and retain a/only 10x engineers (these same startups/companies usually offer a 1x or less compensation package). If you think I'm wrong, then fire 90% of your engineers and see where that gets you; that would be an interesting result if productivity increased! I think this is separate from mere jealousy or denial; 10x engineers definitely do exist and I look up to them for inspiration and example.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  > The one idea I don't like about 10x engineers is the rhetoric by startups or companies around hiring is "we're only looking for rockstars and 10x engineers" Completely agree. That's recruiting/marketing bullshit. They're trying to appeal to people's egos, but probably have the opposite effect, as you say. Also, I doubt one could actually recognize these top-tier engineers, at least not in today's standard interviews. But... I did actually job-interview a 10x'er for a startup years ago. It wasn't a standard interview but rather a long, casual lunch (he was a friend-of-a-friend). After two hours of talking about engineering/coding/etc, I started to suspect: "Huh, I think this guy might be a better than me." What I didn't realize is just how much better than me he would turn out to be -- it was amazing and a joy to learn from him.

mathgladiator 4y ago

Comparison is the thief of joy. The notion of context is exceptionally important because it relates to Price's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price ). You see this in big tech like crazy where most engineers are trying to get a few things done in a massive code base, and then many decisions come from on-high via principal engineers. As a former senior principal engineer, I've been there, seen it, and enjoyed it. The question that haunted me was how to help more people grow into higher roles, and the problem is a lack of scope. This lack of scope is oppressive as there are only so many creative needs and the volume of toil is hard to avoid. So, yes, if you have the right context, then you can do great. However, we also can't dismiss intelligence, memory, or experience as multipliers. The unfortunate fact is that these are not uniformly shared, so there are a bunch of people talking over each other. Worst yet, we don't have a common way of thinking about experience, and here Price's Law reveals an ugly truth: deep experience is rare.

mathgladiator 4y ago

The title of the article is "10x (engineer, context) pairs" and the submitted title is... clickbait-y.

dang 4y ago
Yes. We've reverted the title now (submitted title was "On the myth versus reality of ten-x engineers"). "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

eugenhotaj 4y ago

Just take a look at big tech salaries on levels.fyi. Very senior engineers (L8/L9) easily make 10x the salary of entry to mid-level engineers (L3/L4/L5). For a lot of tech companies, L5 is a terminal level meaning most engineers will spend the rest of their careers there. Clearly the market thinks 10x engineers exist.

andrew_ 4y ago

"10x engineer" is a signpost that means "run away fast" if I see it in job posts or from leadership.

dgb23 4y ago
Because they want you to do 10x the work for 0.8x the pay?
- andrew_ 4y ago
  bingo. Kable, a new YC company, keeps posting jobs for 10x engineers. To their credit they list salary ranges, but it's towards the middle.

TheBigSalad 4y ago

Ffs, the claim is that the great engineers are 10x better than the worst engineers. Stop asking if 10x engineers exist and ask if some engineers are only 1x of the best. I've worked with people who spend months on a story that I can do in 3 days. I've seen engineers so bad that they provide negative value with all the time they suck from others. 10x is an understatement.

KenoFischer 4y ago

I'm not sure I really "got distracted" by building those tools. Building the tools was kind of the point for me and the class was simply a good way to focus the tools on a concrete effort. I acknowledge that it ended up occasionally getting me in trouble when forward progress on class projects was stalled on seemingly unrelated tooling and I got an appropriate admonition about it at the end of the year from the professor, but on the other hand, doing the class this way was way more impactful long-term. A lot of that tooling is still in active use across the Julia ecosystem, while the actual code it was used for at the time never got touched again after the end of the semester. That's pretty much my general philosophy when it comes to writing software though. Whenever possible, figure out what tooling would have made the task easy and then build that and solve the problem simultaneously. You're probably gonna have to throw away the latter code, but at least the next time it'll be easier, because you now have the tooling. Even better if you happen to be in a position like mine where you already build tools for others, because that way other people will end up benefiting too. Anyway, does it still occasionally get me in trouble? Yes. I not infrequently end up in situations where the software is essentially done, but I have to write a compiler pass to make it actually work, because I decided to write the code in a way that I thought it should be written, rather than a way that would be performant out of the box. But hey, at least I'm aware of it (https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1529814861693259777 https://twitter.com/KenoFischer/status/1529814861693259777) ;).

FunnyBadger 4y ago

Dealing with this right now actually. We (a start-up) got bought. The product was split into two teams - we originally did BOTH HW and SW. Their HW team was pretty good so we let them do the HW and we did the SW. The problem can from the HW actually being HW + FW (a form of SW) and turns out they are mediocre at best FW and digital design and that's become a problem (we have to hook into what they are doing). We (the original startup crew) finally figured out what the problem was: their commitment to ANYTHING (our HW project but also every other product they've ever worked on) is exactly the same as how most people treat school and homework, namely, how much can get away with NOT thinking and doing about it and still get a passing grade. They can't be "fixed" because that's how deep the problem is: they've been trained for this attitude since they were children and they wouldn't know how to break out if their lives depended on it; they are not dumb or low-IQ. But they've been trained to achieve the lowest-common-denominator of anything they design or engineer. This has never been how any of us have approached anything in life. For us, it's: 1. Do the best job regardless of what you could get away with 2. Focus on the big picture and little picture integration 3. Know who actually makes the product a success: the customer and the market Significantly IMO I went to elite schools on merit rather than legacy/money while my co-founder was home-schooled and didn't actually finish his BS but he has more drive and commitment than 99 out of 100 BS EE or CS degree holders I've ever met or worked with. Most people mouth the words but either don't actually know what they mean or do not mean what they are saying when they say them. This may not be sufficient but I think it's a necessary difference between normie engineers and 10x engineers.

gamblor956 4y ago

The flipside of the 10x engineer is the 1/10 engineer, generally "codemonkeys" that learned to "program" at a bootcamp. Their skills are limited to the particular framework and tools they used at their bootcamp, and they have less ability to learn new tools and languages than the average designer or marketing person. Despite their poor skills, 1/10 engineers generally think that they are the best, smartest, and most productive programmers at whatever company is unfortunate/dumb enough to employ them. Mostly because they take so much time to do everything, and they think that time spent is equivalent to productivity. But their code is so brittle, it can only handle limited scenarios and tends to fall apart under load. The 1/10 engineers frequently get into arguments related to tech issues into which they have no knowledge or insight, because they assume that being able to code makes them omniscient gods (this afflictions also affects many 1x programmers as well). 1/10 engineers are the reason so many LA tech companies (my employer included) no longer hire bootcamp graduates.

someweirdperson 4y ago

It is just a matter of the frame of reference. In an organization with a large number of 0.1x developers, skilled developers may look like 10x. The 0.1x ones don't really understand the problem they are working on, nor can they write even a few lines of coherent code, often with only a minimalistic understanding of the language they are using. Spotting them is easy: Watching them use the editor of their choice to work on code feels like watching a toddler learning to walk. Different organizations happen to hire different kind of people. For some organizations hiring skilled developers is a matter of luck. The skilled ones they manage to hire are outliers, easily perceived as 10x. Other organization manage to hire mostly skilled developers and PIP the rest. In that kind of environment 10x does not exist. That's the perfect base for an argument. Depending on the individuals background it is very obvious that 10x exists / does not exist.

eventhorizonpl 4y ago

I do not doubt that there are 10/ programmers. Programmers that are just lazy slackers.

tjs8rj 4y ago

I have no idea why this is so contentious in the engineering discipline like it’s some unique question. When you were in school, weren’t their students just far more capable than others? When you look at sports, aren’t there just players far more capable than everyone else (any pro player vs any non pro)? When you look at art, aren’t there just artists so much better than others (professional artists vs a hobbyist)? Salespersons? Dog trainers? Snowboarders? Etc Every discipline has a bell curve of skill, and there are engineers who are just significantly better than others and it’s not even close (like any profession). There are limits, but software engineering isn’t anything special here where the idea of outliers warrants this much controversy. Yes there are “10x engineers”, obviously, because every domain has skill levels spanning magnitudes. It seems like the only thing preventing recognition of this fact is ego (and to be clear, I don’t think I’m a 10x engineer at all)

ravi-delia 4y ago
Yeah I'm happy with my little toys and I've hacked some cool things together quickly, but I've known people who could really do 10x the work just because it was that easy for them. They knew what the problem was immediately and how to fix it well. Working on their code was (and, lucky me, is) a dream.
8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
i think i was a 10x engineer at my last job, but the bar was much lower. now I'm just average. it's all relative

jerDev 4y ago

This is very subjective. ( obviously ) You can go 10x speed in a direction that is pointless. Not all work equates to value. The best product is the simplest that makes the most money. Duct tape and hacks make money. There is zero value in going beyond that. Over-engineering is an epidemic. “cool” means nothing. Engineering is a tool for a job, it’s not a product in itself. If your internal parser fails when you see a comment in code with bad grammar and you strive to fix it, that is you being neurotic not useful. Engineers love to build kingdoms in the details that nobody gives a fuck about.

dasil003 4y ago

The concept of the "10x engineer" has vastly outlived its usefulness. Remember, it originally was a response to clueless non-technical management who thought that programmers were completely fungible—the type of thinking that led to early waves of offshoring based on headcount costs, and a willful ignorance that the details that technical staff spend their time working on actually matter. But once you get past the pointy-hairs, all this framing does is set up a falsely quantitative comparison between broad swathes of engineers whose work can not and should not be compared in this way. Is it really any surprise that a meme created for the bean counters is going to draw ire and vitriol from passionate, diligent and opinionated software professionals? There is absolutely no point in the general debate about what "10x engineer" is (or whether it really exists). Yes, people have vastly different skills. Yes, there are things which some engineers can do which others could never do. Yes, there are Dunning-Kruger cases without the chops, humility or awareness to acknowledge this. Trying to quantify and strictly define those things though? Pointless.

jerDev 4y ago

It benefits nobody to be a 10x engineer unless they are making 10x salary. In fact, once you have the job, the absolute best play is to do as little as possible and not get fired. We are businesses ourselves, don’t forget that. You work for money, and once you have the money, there is no reason to ever give more value than you are getting. Want more money? Study for an interview and then return to your minimal effort process. Believing that you need to give more is the company winning. Treat yourself like a shrewd startup business.

a_square_peg 4y ago

Software industry would really benefit once we grow out of discussing this 10x notion - it's the same level of juvenile (high-school/undergrad) discussion as whether geniuses and gifted people really exist (they do) but in professional settings, it matters very little.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

renewiltord 4y ago

What makes an engineer 10x is if he does shit or he talks on the internet about the absence of 10x engineers.

ncmncm 4y ago

I know an objectively-measured 500x engineer. On a 6-month crash project with 1000 engineers assigned, at the end, fully half the code delivered was his. You can't get any more objective than that. To be clear: this was a project where, if not delivered on the 6-month mark, the company would not be paid. It is hard to see how, without his work, the project could have delivered on time. I have worked with a few others of similar ability. I have never had a bad experience with one.

MaxBarraclough 4y ago
It may be that this developer really did single-handedly save the day, but: > half the code delivered was his. You can't get any more objective than that. Counting lines of code is a famously ineffective way to measure productivity. It encourages low-density code style, and encourages working on easy development tasks. It also encourages prioritising velocity over quality, although in many contexts that may be what you want.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  It can be quite effective after the fact. Our 500x engineer had no reason to pad, and every reason to avoid wasting time writing anything nonfunctional. In the event, he assigned two-week tasks, and where not done on time he would do them himself over the weekend. During the two weeks, he would do up to ten such tasks, despite that he reserved the harder tasks for himself.

woopwoop24 4y ago

i mean there are so many factors to this equation, writing code is the least of my problems. i try to focus more on enabling my teammates to avoid making bigger mistakes and growing them to be decent engineers, rather than optimizing my own work by a few percent. After all software engineering is a team effort for most of the times. What does it matter if i am 10x more productive and crank out all the solutions and code and the rest are all juniors and i have a bus factor of 1? sometime it feels like people have to show-off or be the shining knights how save the day and want to be padded on the back constantly for that.