11 ms·

Software folk taking the 10x thing seriously is akin to PC gamers unironically calling themselves the "PC master race". I have a hard time taking that conversat

Software folk taking the 10x thing seriously is akin to PC gamers unironically calling themselves the "PC master race". I have a hard time taking that conversation seriously.

PedroBatista 4y ago
The tragic thing is: Most of this industry takes the concept of the 10x, 100x developer very seriously. Just talk to a manager and slide that into the conversation, I bet 9 out of 10 will recite the gospel unironically. I am guessing these numbers aren't that better for software developers. Because all this can easily be mixed with job performance and effectiveness which are obviously real things.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  A fun comparison is that Usain Bolt, who literally wins gold medals, is not even a 10x runner: a tenth of his world-record speed 100m works out to a brisk walk.
  - eloff 4y ago
    That's no leverage in running. There's a lot of leverage in software engineering. That's what allows such a wide diversity of productivity.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      What is leverage? VIM?
      - zarzavat 4y ago
        Compare a programmer with good autocomplete to a programmer who has to keep stopping to look up documentation online. That’s a double digit % improvement just by installing the right plugins.
      - whatshisface 4y ago
        Leverage is just another word for debt. ;-)
      - trashtester 4y ago
        A good editor (and the ability to use it efficiently) is a relatively small factor, comparable to the ability to type quickly. Much greater leverage can be found in the ability to innovate, to have the undestanding needed to quickly select a good approach to solve some problem and the social skills needed to lead a team or company in a direction where they can (to re-use the term) leverage such new innovations in ways that generate maximum value. For instance, if you have a team that uses RESTful java microservices on k8s for EVERYTHING, many compute heavy or IO heavy tasks may require massive clusters to run a data processing pipeline. If you're the engineers that identifies this as inefficient, finds way to build the pipeline using a more suitable tech stack, and introduce this stack to your company, you could the infrastructure cost of a company by millions per year. That's kind of comparing the use of cargo ships to mules for transporting goods. And if the tech you introduce also enable 10 other devs to develop 3x faster, this alone would make your effort as valuable as having at least 20 more such engineers. (20x).
      - eloff 4y ago
        In this context, the ability to have an outsized impact in relation to your input. Think of a physical lever.
        mattkrause 4y ago
        The reason I don't like "10x engineer" as a term is that it's often presented as an attribute of the person, but I think it's really often an attribute of the situation. People obviously differ in abilities, but those differences are massively exaggerated by the environment. The best engineer at Twitter probably isn't getting much done this month. Conversely, a few people who were solidly average at their last job are probably rocking it because they've landed in a place where the work is a good match for their skills, the path forward is obvious and feels secure, and they're getting the needed support from their colleagues.
  - coryrc 4y ago
    He's ten times faster than my grandfather could go 100m.
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      Depending on the source[0], average walking speed in older adults is about 0.8-1 m/s. The world record is 100m /9.63 s = 10.4 m/s, so it would not be at all surprising if your grandad were just about 10x slower. Since the "10x engineer" is defined relative to other engineers, the right comparison is probably more like "other runners" than all people, which of course narrows that gap even more. [0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 summarizes some studies in Table 1.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    Now do an ultra-marathoner
    - mattkrause 4y ago
      The world record for 100 miles is about 11 hours. I'd bet most healthy adults could cover 10 miles in a day of sight-seeing. A walk around Central Park is about 6 miles, for comparison. Throw in a museum or two and you're mostly there.
  - im3w1l 4y ago
    A big part of being 10x is to use the right tool for the job. In this case a plane.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      Or build the right tool for a job, for others to use. Imagine a world without tractors. The engineer that designs a tractor and builds a tractor factory would be a million-x farmer, while the farmers who buy the tractors become 10x farmers, until the others catch up. Innovations and inventions, even in a very small and local context, may easily generate >10x more value than the output of a stereotypical "code monkey" who at best delivers according to a well written documentation.
- sublinear 4y ago
  It should be common practice to force management to put out a fire every now and then rather than dictate from afar. Shouldn't be a problem right?
- simmschi 4y ago
  Yes. And somehow the same people would feel offended by the idea of there being 10x POs / Teamleads / VPs etc.
eloff 4y ago
Do you guys work on the same industry as me? There's easily a 10x difference between the best guy on the team and the worst guy who's about to be on the performance plan. It's a real thing. A lot of programmers really suck. I interview them and wonder why they're in this industry to begin with. I'm easily 10x those guys, they struggle with for loops. Then there are some superstars like Evan Wallace who created esbuild, churning out some 50k lines of code in a year, while working full time as CTO of Figma. He's 10x me. So there's more than a factor of 100x there without getting into the really important part. Solving the right problem. That's really hard, and after twenty years I'm still trying to get a handle on it. It's more than 100x really, because of you took one of those guys who can't grok for loops and asked him to create esbuild, they will never be able to do it. There's a lot of leverage in software engineering, and a lot of room for difference between people.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  So you're 1x, Evan Wallace is 10x, and the pour souls in question are 0.1x.
  - voxelghost 4y ago
    It's almost as if we were all on some sort of spectrum.
    - sublinear 4y ago
      It's almost as if "productivity" is subjective. I've met plenty of devs who are better at relieving technical debt than fulfilling business requirements. Who is measuring the productivity?
      - trashtester 4y ago
        > It's almost as if "productivity" is subjective. "Productivity" could be defined as the value (typically monetary value) that the value of the company is generating (before salaries) based on the contribution of that resource(engineer in this case), per unit time. Future income should be calculated using a present-day-value approach. The productivity of a single engineer could be defined as the reduction in company value generation from removing that person from the company (assuming the company is large enough to have multiple people available in each role). Rank order this, and you can define the 10x as those whose removal would cost the company (before salaries) >10x more than the removal of the median contributor. Note that this definition is based on productivity within a given company. A single person could be a 10x engineer in one company, and a 1x engineer in another. Some companies require engineers with very deep understanding of compter science, maths, statistics or physics. Others benefit from engineers that are domain experts within their business domain, and yet again other companies may primarily need engineers who understand and can work with people of all backgrounds.
usrbinbash 4y ago
It's just another round in an endlessly repeating cycle. Remember "Unicorn Devs"? "Framework Evangelist"? "Superstar Developer?" In a few years "10x dev" will fall out of use, and we will have the next term du jour. My money is on "Astronaut Dev".
- kqr 4y ago
  Oh we are no longer supposed to be rockstar ninjas? *Updating profile*
- mlvljr 4y ago
idiocrat 4y ago
The non-serious counterpart is the "Real Programmer".

Software folk taking the 10x thing seriously is akin to PC gamers unironically calling themselves the "PC master race". I have a hard time taking that conversation seriously.

PedroBatista 4y ago

The tragic thing is: Most of this industry takes the concept of the 10x, 100x developer very seriously. Just talk to a manager and slide that into the conversation, I bet 9 out of 10 will recite the gospel unironically. I am guessing these numbers aren't that better for software developers. Because all this can easily be mixed with job performance and effectiveness which are obviously real things.

mattkrause 4y ago
A fun comparison is that Usain Bolt, who literally wins gold medals, is not even a 10x runner: a tenth of his world-record speed 100m works out to a brisk walk.
- eloff 4y ago
  That's no leverage in running. There's a lot of leverage in software engineering. That's what allows such a wide diversity of productivity.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    What is leverage? VIM?
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      Compare a programmer with good autocomplete to a programmer who has to keep stopping to look up documentation online. That’s a double digit % improvement just by installing the right plugins.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      Leverage is just another word for debt. ;-)
    - trashtester 4y ago
      A good editor (and the ability to use it efficiently) is a relatively small factor, comparable to the ability to type quickly. Much greater leverage can be found in the ability to innovate, to have the undestanding needed to quickly select a good approach to solve some problem and the social skills needed to lead a team or company in a direction where they can (to re-use the term) leverage such new innovations in ways that generate maximum value. For instance, if you have a team that uses RESTful java microservices on k8s for EVERYTHING, many compute heavy or IO heavy tasks may require massive clusters to run a data processing pipeline. If you're the engineers that identifies this as inefficient, finds way to build the pipeline using a more suitable tech stack, and introduce this stack to your company, you could the infrastructure cost of a company by millions per year. That's kind of comparing the use of cargo ships to mules for transporting goods. And if the tech you introduce also enable 10 other devs to develop 3x faster, this alone would make your effort as valuable as having at least 20 more such engineers. (20x).
    - eloff 4y ago
      In this context, the ability to have an outsized impact in relation to your input. Think of a physical lever.
      - mattkrause 4y ago
        The reason I don't like "10x engineer" as a term is that it's often presented as an attribute of the person, but I think it's really often an attribute of the situation. People obviously differ in abilities, but those differences are massively exaggerated by the environment. The best engineer at Twitter probably isn't getting much done this month. Conversely, a few people who were solidly average at their last job are probably rocking it because they've landed in a place where the work is a good match for their skills, the path forward is obvious and feels secure, and they're getting the needed support from their colleagues.
- coryrc 4y ago
  He's ten times faster than my grandfather could go 100m.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Depending on the source[0], average walking speed in older adults is about 0.8-1 m/s. The world record is 100m /9.63 s = 10.4 m/s, so it would not be at all surprising if your grandad were just about 10x slower. Since the "10x engineer" is defined relative to other engineers, the right comparison is probably more like "other runners" than all people, which of course narrows that gap even more. [0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 summarizes some studies in Table 1.
- bluedino 4y ago
  Now do an ultra-marathoner
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    The world record for 100 miles is about 11 hours. I'd bet most healthy adults could cover 10 miles in a day of sight-seeing. A walk around Central Park is about 6 miles, for comparison. Throw in a museum or two and you're mostly there.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  A big part of being 10x is to use the right tool for the job. In this case a plane.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Or build the right tool for a job, for others to use. Imagine a world without tractors. The engineer that designs a tractor and builds a tractor factory would be a million-x farmer, while the farmers who buy the tractors become 10x farmers, until the others catch up. Innovations and inventions, even in a very small and local context, may easily generate >10x more value than the output of a stereotypical "code monkey" who at best delivers according to a well written documentation.
sublinear 4y ago
It should be common practice to force management to put out a fire every now and then rather than dictate from afar. Shouldn't be a problem right?
simmschi 4y ago
Yes. And somehow the same people would feel offended by the idea of there being 10x POs / Teamleads / VPs etc.

eloff 4y ago

Do you guys work on the same industry as me? There's easily a 10x difference between the best guy on the team and the worst guy who's about to be on the performance plan. It's a real thing. A lot of programmers really suck. I interview them and wonder why they're in this industry to begin with. I'm easily 10x those guys, they struggle with for loops. Then there are some superstars like Evan Wallace who created esbuild, churning out some 50k lines of code in a year, while working full time as CTO of Figma. He's 10x me. So there's more than a factor of 100x there without getting into the really important part. Solving the right problem. That's really hard, and after twenty years I'm still trying to get a handle on it. It's more than 100x really, because of you took one of those guys who can't grok for loops and asked him to create esbuild, they will never be able to do it. There's a lot of leverage in software engineering, and a lot of room for difference between people.

nerdponx 4y ago
So you're 1x, Evan Wallace is 10x, and the pour souls in question are 0.1x.
- voxelghost 4y ago
  It's almost as if we were all on some sort of spectrum.
  - sublinear 4y ago
    It's almost as if "productivity" is subjective. I've met plenty of devs who are better at relieving technical debt than fulfilling business requirements. Who is measuring the productivity?
    - trashtester 4y ago
      > It's almost as if "productivity" is subjective. "Productivity" could be defined as the value (typically monetary value) that the value of the company is generating (before salaries) based on the contribution of that resource(engineer in this case), per unit time. Future income should be calculated using a present-day-value approach. The productivity of a single engineer could be defined as the reduction in company value generation from removing that person from the company (assuming the company is large enough to have multiple people available in each role). Rank order this, and you can define the 10x as those whose removal would cost the company (before salaries) >10x more than the removal of the median contributor. Note that this definition is based on productivity within a given company. A single person could be a 10x engineer in one company, and a 1x engineer in another. Some companies require engineers with very deep understanding of compter science, maths, statistics or physics. Others benefit from engineers that are domain experts within their business domain, and yet again other companies may primarily need engineers who understand and can work with people of all backgrounds.

usrbinbash 4y ago

It's just another round in an endlessly repeating cycle. Remember "Unicorn Devs"? "Framework Evangelist"? "Superstar Developer?" In a few years "10x dev" will fall out of use, and we will have the next term du jour. My money is on "Astronaut Dev".

kqr 4y ago
Oh we are no longer supposed to be rockstar ninjas? *Updating profile*
mlvljr 4y ago

idiocrat 4y ago

The non-serious counterpart is the "Real Programmer".