6 ms·

I always thought the term "10x engineer" was only used in job ads. Nobody I know refers to themselves (or even thinks of themselves) as a "?x engineer", unless

I always thought the term "10x engineer" was only used in job ads. Nobody I know refers to themselves (or even thinks of themselves) as a "?x engineer", unless it's for marketing purposes in which case you might as well put 100x for good measure. The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing". They may also say that the most valuable thing that they have learned over their career is humility. There is always going to be something new and shiny to learn, things will always be breaking around you, a fake prophet will push today's ideology to sunset yesterday's. The only thing that you can do is to always be resourceful, to grow holistically as a person, and help others grow as well. Avoid any company that tries to distill these virtues inside banal presentations and check-the-box training sessions. It is better to ask an unassuming looking person inside the company if they have grown as a person, who helped them, and whom are they helping do the same. Good luck!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ramblerman 4y ago
The term doesn't come from people calling themselves 10x engineers. It was from a study that showed vast differences in performance across software engineers, up to 10x. The study has been criticized somewhat since then but I think the critics miss the point. Regardless if it is 2x or 10x, or somewhere in between, these differences do exist.
- hu3 4y ago
  I've seen -1x engineers too (and probably have been one).
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    Don’t be so small minded. I’ve seen -infinity project managers and architects.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    I think the -10x engineer is more common, and therefore this type has has more overall impact, than the +10x type.
- blowski 4y ago
  The suits seem to think it's about how quick they type or how focused they are, but this is of course nonsense. Some engineers have such deep knowledge of their tech stack they avoid making costly mistakes, or use features in their stack that would otherwise get re-implemented in the codebase. This can make them more like 100x developers. For example, we had slow query performance in Postgres. I (a 1x engineer) couldn't optimise the query, so I suggested building out a caching layer, with an estimate of 2-3 weeks. My colleague (a 10x engineer) used a window function that took about an hour. Perhaps from their perspective, I'm a -10x engineer.
- paulcole 4y ago
  > It was from a study In case anybody is curious, here’s the study from 1968: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/481/readings/productivity-performance.pdf https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/481/readings/productivit...
  - singron 4y ago
    I thought it was from Peopleware. They claimed they found the result by performing coding wargames among professional programmers in the 80s. They claim that the best are 10x better than the worst but only 2.5x better than the median. Additionally programmers from the same organizations had very similar performance. I.e. there probably isn't a 10x difference in performance within your company. The book claims similar distributions when you measure many kinds of human performance, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were many studies that replicated the general idea.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  The study was of students, no one has a strong idea of how that actually correlates to professional work. Myself personally, I don't think it does, not because some people aren't naturally better at programming than others, but because at some point the important decisions are unrelated to programming and are more about systemic decisions at a wholistic level.
jl2718 4y ago
I am a 10x engineer. I have the awesome capability to show you that a project is going to cost 10x the time/budget, and why you don’t need it, and should probably focus on the obvious 1x idea.
- tartoran 4y ago
  But if you claim to be a 10x you’d be able to finish their 1x idea in 1/10th of the time wouldn’t you?
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    It is 1/10th the time of the original idea...
- szundi 4y ago
  If you can quickly cope with reality and accept some of the surprising stuff out there, I believe then you can be a 10x. Although this makes the scope 2x and you are just 5x then
- jcpst 4y ago
  I always go with 11x engineer. It’s even better than 10x
  - jl2718 4y ago
    11x abs…. What are you, crazy? Nobody can work out their abs in 11x.
bjornsing 4y ago
I don’t mind calling myself a 10x engineer, but it’s of course better when others do so. ;) Honestly I’m quite tired of this false humility norm. Seems to me it’s mostly about redistributing the fruits of common labors from those that focus on the craft and try to improve their productivity, towards the socially focused “humility experts”. I much prefer working with cocky 10x engineers rather than these humility policing 1x ones…
- noufalibrahim 4y ago
  I think it's a marketing thing. I'd call myself that if i were attending a job interview perhaps and trying to sell myself. I wouldn't call myself that if I were speaking to a junior developer and helping him with something that's difficult enough to sap his confidence.
- throwaway0147 4y ago
  The problem in my experience is that cocky attitudes have a tendency to spread and it creates a really difficult work environment. You also have to take the Dunning-Kruger effect into account, where most developers aren't able to evaluate themselves correctly. In our work we have a tendency to view thing as "right" and "wrong". I often find people with a few years of experience to be the worst. They have enough experience to recognise that they are more knowledgable than juniors, but lack the overall picture. Some even come out of studies this way, because they are used to being the smartest in their class and have built up their egos. "Why is the old shitty code written this way, they must have been stupid? We need to rewrite it in the framework I read about in the blog last week". Only experience will teach them that things are not that simple. If they are not exposed to the right working environments in their first jobs, they will spread this negativity for years until they (hopefully) grow as persons. Pro tip: If something looks unnecessarily complex, there may actually be a reason for it. In the case where you need to rewrite/refactor working stable code, don't try to negatively push down others to enhance your own feeling of superiority. Keep the arguments as objective as possible. If you have tracked the code to specific individuals, at least talk to them in private first to get their input instead of assuming you know best.
  - 4y ago
schwartzworld 4y ago
A smart 10x engineer would use his special power to do 1/10 the work everyone else does.
- randomdata 4y ago
  As a dumb 10x engineer, I once tried being on the job 1/10th the hours of my colleagues and I still ended up outproducing them by an order of magnitude. I failed to account for the fact that they waste a lot of time doing unrelated tasks, like meetings, leaving only a fraction of their day to get anything done.
  - mylons 4y ago
    how is that dumb of you? even as a salaried employee your time is ultimately what you’re selling to your employer. you just reduced your cost of goods by 10.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      Well, I could have also put in 1/10th of the work, not just 1/10th of the hours, and matched their output. Also, I'm just naturally dumb.
      - mylons 4y ago
        lowering the quality effects the perception of the quality of your product. i don’t think it’s smart to do that. i’m curious if you’re being facetious, though, due to a possible resentment of your co workers. IF you’re doing that, remember you’re just being paid to do YOUR job. management knows who the performers are.
        randomdata 4y ago
        Why would quality be reduced? Producing 1x output can still be of high quality. What kind of resentment would there be towards my coworkers? I am not sure where feelings would be coming into play at all, let alone ill feelings.
sweaty 4y ago
> The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing" This just tells me that the engineer in question is very good, but also has imposter syndrome.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ramblerman 4y ago

The term doesn't come from people calling themselves 10x engineers. It was from a study that showed vast differences in performance across software engineers, up to 10x. The study has been criticized somewhat since then but I think the critics miss the point. Regardless if it is 2x or 10x, or somewhere in between, these differences do exist.

hu3 4y ago
I've seen -1x engineers too (and probably have been one).
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  Don’t be so small minded. I’ve seen -infinity project managers and architects.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  I think the -10x engineer is more common, and therefore this type has has more overall impact, than the +10x type.
blowski 4y ago
The suits seem to think it's about how quick they type or how focused they are, but this is of course nonsense. Some engineers have such deep knowledge of their tech stack they avoid making costly mistakes, or use features in their stack that would otherwise get re-implemented in the codebase. This can make them more like 100x developers. For example, we had slow query performance in Postgres. I (a 1x engineer) couldn't optimise the query, so I suggested building out a caching layer, with an estimate of 2-3 weeks. My colleague (a 10x engineer) used a window function that took about an hour. Perhaps from their perspective, I'm a -10x engineer.
paulcole 4y ago
> It was from a study In case anybody is curious, here’s the study from 1968: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/481/readings/productivity-performance.pdf https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/481/readings/productivit...
- singron 4y ago
  I thought it was from Peopleware. They claimed they found the result by performing coding wargames among professional programmers in the 80s. They claim that the best are 10x better than the worst but only 2.5x better than the median. Additionally programmers from the same organizations had very similar performance. I.e. there probably isn't a 10x difference in performance within your company. The book claims similar distributions when you measure many kinds of human performance, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were many studies that replicated the general idea.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
The study was of students, no one has a strong idea of how that actually correlates to professional work. Myself personally, I don't think it does, not because some people aren't naturally better at programming than others, but because at some point the important decisions are unrelated to programming and are more about systemic decisions at a wholistic level.

jl2718 4y ago

I am a 10x engineer. I have the awesome capability to show you that a project is going to cost 10x the time/budget, and why you don’t need it, and should probably focus on the obvious 1x idea.

tartoran 4y ago
But if you claim to be a 10x you’d be able to finish their 1x idea in 1/10th of the time wouldn’t you?
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  It is 1/10th the time of the original idea...
szundi 4y ago
If you can quickly cope with reality and accept some of the surprising stuff out there, I believe then you can be a 10x. Although this makes the scope 2x and you are just 5x then
jcpst 4y ago
I always go with 11x engineer. It’s even better than 10x
- jl2718 4y ago
  11x abs…. What are you, crazy? Nobody can work out their abs in 11x.

bjornsing 4y ago

I don’t mind calling myself a 10x engineer, but it’s of course better when others do so. ;) Honestly I’m quite tired of this false humility norm. Seems to me it’s mostly about redistributing the fruits of common labors from those that focus on the craft and try to improve their productivity, towards the socially focused “humility experts”. I much prefer working with cocky 10x engineers rather than these humility policing 1x ones…

noufalibrahim 4y ago
I think it's a marketing thing. I'd call myself that if i were attending a job interview perhaps and trying to sell myself. I wouldn't call myself that if I were speaking to a junior developer and helping him with something that's difficult enough to sap his confidence.
throwaway0147 4y ago
The problem in my experience is that cocky attitudes have a tendency to spread and it creates a really difficult work environment. You also have to take the Dunning-Kruger effect into account, where most developers aren't able to evaluate themselves correctly. In our work we have a tendency to view thing as "right" and "wrong". I often find people with a few years of experience to be the worst. They have enough experience to recognise that they are more knowledgable than juniors, but lack the overall picture. Some even come out of studies this way, because they are used to being the smartest in their class and have built up their egos. "Why is the old shitty code written this way, they must have been stupid? We need to rewrite it in the framework I read about in the blog last week". Only experience will teach them that things are not that simple. If they are not exposed to the right working environments in their first jobs, they will spread this negativity for years until they (hopefully) grow as persons. Pro tip: If something looks unnecessarily complex, there may actually be a reason for it. In the case where you need to rewrite/refactor working stable code, don't try to negatively push down others to enhance your own feeling of superiority. Keep the arguments as objective as possible. If you have tracked the code to specific individuals, at least talk to them in private first to get their input instead of assuming you know best.
- 4y ago

schwartzworld 4y ago

A smart 10x engineer would use his special power to do 1/10 the work everyone else does.

randomdata 4y ago
As a dumb 10x engineer, I once tried being on the job 1/10th the hours of my colleagues and I still ended up outproducing them by an order of magnitude. I failed to account for the fact that they waste a lot of time doing unrelated tasks, like meetings, leaving only a fraction of their day to get anything done.
- mylons 4y ago
  how is that dumb of you? even as a salaried employee your time is ultimately what you’re selling to your employer. you just reduced your cost of goods by 10.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    Well, I could have also put in 1/10th of the work, not just 1/10th of the hours, and matched their output. Also, I'm just naturally dumb.
    - mylons 4y ago
      lowering the quality effects the perception of the quality of your product. i don’t think it’s smart to do that. i’m curious if you’re being facetious, though, due to a possible resentment of your co workers. IF you’re doing that, remember you’re just being paid to do YOUR job. management knows who the performers are.
      - randomdata 4y ago
        Why would quality be reduced? Producing 1x output can still be of high quality. What kind of resentment would there be towards my coworkers? I am not sure where feelings would be coming into play at all, let alone ill feelings.

sweaty 4y ago

> The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing" This just tells me that the engineer in question is very good, but also has imposter syndrome.