8 ms·

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to be possible, which then gives amazing leverage to deliver working software in a fraction of the time.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Your definition is also vague. Someone still needs to do the legwork. One man armies who can do everything themselves don't really fit in standardized teams where everything is compartmentalized and work divided and spread out. They work best on their own projects with nobody else in their way, no colleagues, no managers, but that's not most jobs. Once you're part of a team, you can't do too much work yourself no matter how good you are, as inevitably the other slower/weaker team members will slow you down as you'll fight dealing with the issues they introduce into the project or the issues from management, so every team moves at the speed of the lowest common denominator no matter their rockstars.
- jollyllama 3y ago
  That rings true and is probably why the 10x engineers I have seen usually work on devops or modify the framework the other devs are using in some way. For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    > For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved. Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually a one time thing. And one time things don't usually make you a 10x dev. Maybe you just got lucky once to see something others missed. And often times at big places most people know where the low hanging fruits are and can fix them, but management, release schedules and tech debt are perpetually in the way. IMHO what makes you a 10x dev is you always know how to unblock people no matter the issue so that the project is constantly smooth saling, not chasing orders of magnitude improvements unicorns.
    - tranceylc 3y ago
      Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? What I mean is that the existence of the term tends to bring out people trying to figure who that might be, as if it has to be 100% true. I personally think that some people can provide “10x” (arbitrary) the value on occasion, like the low hanging fruit you said. I also believe some people are slightly more skilled than others, and get more results out of their work. That said, there are so many ways for somebody to have an impact that doesn’t have to immediate, that I find the term itself too prevalent.
      - lukan 3y ago
        "Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? " Agreed, there is too much effort going into the "superstars" theme, but there are definitely people who get 10x done in the same time as others.
        t-3 3y ago
        Yep. No matter what you're doing, some people are more productive than others. Often it's a matter of experience and practice, sometimes ability to focus, sometimes motivation, rarely it's a lack or surplus of inherent ability. Using people effectively in the context of a team all depends on the skill of the manager though.
        whstl 3y ago
        I think a lot of people that complain about 10x chattery in HN should take some kind of carpentry etc course or some other kind of handiwork like that with a real master. Some of those people not only get things done much quicker, but they also get it done with better quality than an amateur, with less mistakes, throwing away less material, sometimes with more safety. This is definitely more than 10x better. And there are some real hacks doing those kinds of jobs. I find programming to be not different than that.
- theamk 3y ago
  Nothing wrong with "one man armies" in the team context. There is a long list of tasks that needs to be done.. over same time period, one person will do 5 complex tasks (with tests and documentation), while the other will do just 1 task, and then spend even more time redoing it properly. Over time this produces funny effects, like super-big 20 point task done in few days because wrong person started working on it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
giantg2 3y ago
I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. I just want to be a good 1x engineer. Or good at anything in life realy.
- datameta 3y ago
  The truest 10x engineer I ever encountered was a memory firmware guy with ASIC experience who absolutely made sure to log off at 5 every day after really putting in the work. Go to guy for all parts of the codebase, even that which he didn't expressly touch.
  - harryvederci 3y ago
    > I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. "The truest 10x engineer I ever encountered was..."
- JimDabell 3y ago
  The “10x engineer” comes from the observation that there is a 10x difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. By saying that you want to be a 1x engineer, you’re saying you want to be the least productive engineer possible. 1x is not the average, 1x is the worst.
  - mathgradthrow 3y ago
    the worst engineer certainly has negative productivity, so I'm not sure that your explanation can possibly be the correct one.
    - JimDabell 3y ago
      I’m explaining what the terms “10x” and “1x” mean, not asserting that the original observation is correct under all circumstances.
      - mathgradthrow 3y ago
throwitaway222 3y ago
No one reading this during the hours of 9-5 is a 10x.
- randomdata 3y ago
  Or is. If a 1x puts in an 8 hour day, a 10x only has to put in a 48 minute day. That leaves plenty of time to read this.
  - simmerup 3y ago
    That’s a bad take because you’re assuming that developer is capable of replicating that * 10
    - adra 3y ago
      That's entirely the fundamental flaw of the Nx developer ethos to a tee. No individual will benchmark reliably against any other person of their same trade/craft perfectly over time. The mythical BS times developer is so over simplified to be a meaningless concept. Hire "unicorn" and get amazing results just isn't a guarantee. They just probably have better chance than average to make a higher impact, which is good enough for companies that are willing to pay Nx times average salaries to acquire them.
  - sebastianz 3y ago
    His point is that smart and productive people are generally hard working, focused and diligent, which is how they get to be so experienced and productive. Hence not wasting time on social networks. > a 10x only has to put in a 48 minute day Nobody would call this person "10x".
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > His point is that smart and productive people are generally hard working, focused and diligent I don't think that tracks. Smart, productive, hard working people don't work 9-5. They work every hour they can, breaking only when they have pushed themselves to the limit. The limit can be hit at any hour. There is no magical property of the universe that gives people unlimited stamina during the hours of 9-5. > Nobody would call this person "10x". I'm not sure they would call anyone that, to be fair. A "10x developer" who also puts in 8 hours alongside the 1x developers isn't a 10x developer, he would be called a sucker.
didgetmaster 3y ago
It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does. Too often, management will focus more on the guy who works 12 hour days to accomplish 8 hours of real work than the guy who gets the same thing accomplished in an 8 hour day. Also, deviations from 'normal' are frowned upon. Taking time to improve the process isn't built into the schedule; so taking time to build a wheelbarrow is discouraged when they think you could be hauling buckets faster instead.
- Terretta 3y ago
  It's almost impossible to get executives to think in return on equity (“RoE”) for the future instead of “costs” measured in dollars and cents last quarter. Which is weird, since so many executives are working in a VC-funded environment, and internal work should be “venture funded” as well.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- happytiger 3y ago
  That’s because most executives can’t understand technology deeply enough to know the difference.
  - didgetmaster 3y ago
    Even when they are smart enough to know, they seem to have very short memories. While I don't consider myself to be a 10x engineer; I have certainly done a number of 10x things over my career. I worked for a company where I almost single handedly built a product that resulted in tens of millions of dollars in sales. I got a nice 'atta boy' for it, but my future ideas were often overridden by someone in management who 'knew better'. After the management changed, I found myself in a downsizing event once I started criticizing them for a lack of innovation.
    - 3y ago
andrei_says_ 3y ago
On my team, one of the main multipliers is understanding the need behind the requested implementation, and proposing alternative solutions - minimizing or avoiding code changes altogether. It helps that we work on internal tooling and are very close to the process and stakeholders. "Hmmm, there's another way to accomplish this" being the 10x. Doing things faster is not it.
- switch007 3y ago
  Exactly this. It’s why it’s so frustrating when product managers who think they’re above giving background run the show (the ones who think they’re your manager and are therefore too important to share that with you)
mettamage 3y ago
When I was in college, I've met a few people that coded _a lot_ faster than me. Typically, they started since they were 12 instead of 21 (like me). That's how 10x engineers exist, by the time they are 30, they have roughly 20 years of programming experience behind their belt instead of 10. Also, their professional experience is much greater. Sure, their initial jobs at 15 are the occassional weird gig for the uncle/aunt or cousin/nephew but they get picked up by professional firms at 18 and do a job next to their CS studies. At least, that's how it used to be. Not sure if this is still happening due to the new job environment, but this was the reality from around 2004 to 2018. For 10x engineers to exist, all it takes is a few examples. To me, everyone is in agreement that they seem to be rare. I point to a public 10x engineer. He'd never say it himself, but my guess is that this person is a 10x engineer [1]. If you disagree, I'm curious how you'd disagree. I'm just a blind man touching a part of the elephant [2]. I do not claim to see the whole picture. [1] https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ (the person who created JSLinux) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant - if you don't know the parable, it's a fun one!
- QuercusMax 3y ago
  Yup, that's been my experience as someone who asked for a C++ compiler for my 12th birthday, worked on a bunch of random websites and webapps for friends of the family, and spent some time at age 16-17 running a Beowulf cluster and attempting to help postdocs port their code to run on MPI (with mixed success). All thru my CS education I was writing tons of toy programs, contributing (as much as I could) toward OSS, reading lots of stuff on best practices, and leaning on my much older (12 years) brother who was working in the industry. He pointed me to Java and IntelliJ, told me to read Design Patterns (Gang of Four) and Refactoring (Fowler). I read Joel on Software religiously, even though he was a Microsoft guy and I was a hardcore Linux-head. By the time I joined my first real company at age 21, I was ready to start putting a lot of this stuff into place. I joined a small med device software company which had a great product but really no strong software engineering culture: zero unit tests, using CVS with no branches, release builds were done manually on the COO's workstation, etc. As literally the most junior person in the company I worked through all these things and convinced my much more senior colleagues that we should start using release branches instead of "hey everybody, please don't check in any new code until we get this release out the door". I wrote automated build scripts mostly for my own benefit, until the COO realized that he didn't have to worry about keeping a dev environment on his machine, now that he didn't code any more. I wrote a junit-inspired unit testing framework for the language we were using (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) - like Matlab but weirder). Without my work as a "10x junior engineer", the company would have been unable to scale to more than 3 or 4 developers. I got involved in hiring and made sure we were hiring people who were on board with writing tests. We finally turned into a "real" software company 2 or 3 years after I joined.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
10x developer is just a buzzword people throw around when they're trying to sell you something.
xnx 3y ago
Anyone can be a 10x engineer when they write something similar/identical to what they've written before. Other jobs are not like this. A plumber may only be 20% faster on the best days of their career.
ManuelKiessling 3y ago
What makes a car go fast? The brakes: https://manuel.kiessling.net/2011/04/07/why-developing-without-tests-is-like-driving-a-car-without-brakes-2/ https://manuel.kiessling.net/2011/04/07/why-developing-witho...
- khazhoux 3y ago
  Literally the opposite of what makes a car go fast :-)
  - ManuelKiessling 3y ago
    Is it? How fast would you drive a car if I gave you the keys and told you „everything works perfectly fine, however the brakes have been removed“?
    - strken 3y ago
      This is the kind of half-correct pithy quote which falls down at the edge cases, e.g. if you're writing an algorithm that selects the lowest-speed car for new learner drivers and for some reason a blissfully unaware learner ends up in a McLaren GT with no brakes for lesson number 1.
BobbyTables2 3y ago
> People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to be possible, which then gives amazing leverage to deliver working software in a fraction of the time. I agree with the first part of your statement, but what really happens to such people? In my experience (sample size greater than one), they receive some kudos, but remain underpaid, never promoted, and are given more work under tight deadlines. At least until some of them are laid off along with lower performers. But for those who say that hard things are impossible, they seem to get along just fine. They merely declare such things as out-of-scope or lie about their roadmap.
- bedobi 3y ago
  > In my experience (sample size greater than one), they receive some kudos, but remain underpaid, never promoted, and are given more work under tight deadlines. At least until some of them are laid off along with lower performers. 100% agree, I've seen plenty of the best of the best get treated like trash and laid off at first sight of trouble on the horizon
hyperthesis 3y ago
I've always thought a x10 is one who sits back and sees a simpler way - like some math problems have an easy solution, if you can see it. Also: change the question; change the context (Alan Kay) (And absolutely not brute-force grinding themselves away)
- whstl 3y ago
  Agreed. You can brute force, but not for long.
strangattractor 3y ago
6.5 X 15 is only 97 hours per week not even close to the 400 hrs (5X40) per week of programming a 10X Rust programmer can provide. I jest but all this 10X stuff is getting ridiculous. They stayed in "Stealth" mode because they didn't have anything worth showing for 5 years. Doesn't sound all that productive to me. More likely what they are trying to do was hard and complicated and took a while to figure out.
- joantune 3y ago
  They're not boasting about their current productivity, they're boasting about the one they achieved at FoundationDB when they implemented the testing, which gave them the idea to build antithesis
devjab 3y ago
In my experience it often comes down to business processes. We have a guy in my extended team who knows everything about his side of the company. When I work with him I accomplish business altering deliveries in a very short amount of time, which after a week or two rarely needs to be touched again unless something in the business changes. He’s not a PO and we don’t do anything too formally because it’s just him, me and another developer + whatever business manager will benefit from the development (and a few testers from their tran). In many ways the way we work these projects are very akin to Team Topologies. At other times I’ll be assigned projects with regular POs, Architects and business employees who barely know what it is they are doing themselves, with poorly defined tasks and all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense “agile” process methods and well spend forever delivering nothing. So sometimes I’m a 50x developer delivering business altering changes. At other times I’m a useless cog in a sea of pseudo workers. I don’t particularly care, I get paid, but if management actually knew what was going on, and how to change it… well…
rukuu001 3y ago
How many organisations - of any kind, startups or enterprise or unicorns or whatever - will invest so much in effort that doesn't even touch the product. Before the product exists! I think the reluctance to invest effort in something that will give devs super-powers 6 months in the future is why we don't get all those 10x devs.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
This is a perceptive observation. In my experience, so called "10x" engineers are as productive as they are because they have a process by which they practice the development on software that anticipates future problems. As a result when they check something in, they spend very little time "debugging" or "fixing bugs" with code that does what they already need it to do. It is always very useful as an engineer to log your time, what are you working on "right now" and is it "new work" , "maintenance work", or "fixing work." Then for each log entry that isn't "new work" thinking about what you could have done that would have caught that problem before it was committed to the code base. I find it is much better to evaluate engineers based on how often they are solving the same problem that they had before vs creating new stuff. That ratio, for me, is the essence of the Nx engineer (for 0.1 < N < 10) The point that Wilson makes that having infrastructure/tools that push that ratio further from "repair" work to "new work" is hugely empowering to an organization.
dclowd9901 3y ago
Yep. Often I find our most accelerative work is stuff that makes testing changes easy (a very simple to bootstrap staging environment) or creates a lot of guarantees (typescript).
TrackerFF 3y ago
Was it 50x productivity due to 10x engineers, or 50x productivity due to optimized company structure? (edit: obviously, these do not need to be mutually exclusive - it's a sum of all the different parts) It's easy to bog down even the best Nx engineers if you keep them occupied with endless bullshit tasks, meetings, (ever) changing timelines, and all that. Kind of like having a professional driver drive a sportscar through a racetrack, versus the streets of Boston.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
The 10x developer I know basically DOES seem to do 10x more than anyone else on our team. But they are working on a team that does relatively simple work and are by far the most senior person on that team. It's like how an NBA player would be a 10x player on a college basketball team. Great to work with them but If I was in their shoes I don't know how enjoyable/engaging the work would be.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

Your definition is also vague. Someone still needs to do the legwork. One man armies who can do everything themselves don't really fit in standardized teams where everything is compartmentalized and work divided and spread out. They work best on their own projects with nobody else in their way, no colleagues, no managers, but that's not most jobs. Once you're part of a team, you can't do too much work yourself no matter how good you are, as inevitably the other slower/weaker team members will slow you down as you'll fight dealing with the issues they introduce into the project or the issues from management, so every team moves at the speed of the lowest common denominator no matter their rockstars.

jollyllama 3y ago
That rings true and is probably why the 10x engineers I have seen usually work on devops or modify the framework the other devs are using in some way. For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  > For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved. Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually a one time thing. And one time things don't usually make you a 10x dev. Maybe you just got lucky once to see something others missed. And often times at big places most people know where the low hanging fruits are and can fix them, but management, release schedules and tech debt are perpetually in the way. IMHO what makes you a 10x dev is you always know how to unblock people no matter the issue so that the project is constantly smooth saling, not chasing orders of magnitude improvements unicorns.
  - tranceylc 3y ago
    Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? What I mean is that the existence of the term tends to bring out people trying to figure who that might be, as if it has to be 100% true. I personally think that some people can provide “10x” (arbitrary) the value on occasion, like the low hanging fruit you said. I also believe some people are slightly more skilled than others, and get more results out of their work. That said, there are so many ways for somebody to have an impact that doesn’t have to immediate, that I find the term itself too prevalent.
    - lukan 3y ago
      "Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? " Agreed, there is too much effort going into the "superstars" theme, but there are definitely people who get 10x done in the same time as others.
      - t-3 3y ago
        Yep. No matter what you're doing, some people are more productive than others. Often it's a matter of experience and practice, sometimes ability to focus, sometimes motivation, rarely it's a lack or surplus of inherent ability. Using people effectively in the context of a team all depends on the skill of the manager though.
        whstl 3y ago
        I think a lot of people that complain about 10x chattery in HN should take some kind of carpentry etc course or some other kind of handiwork like that with a real master. Some of those people not only get things done much quicker, but they also get it done with better quality than an amateur, with less mistakes, throwing away less material, sometimes with more safety. This is definitely more than 10x better. And there are some real hacks doing those kinds of jobs. I find programming to be not different than that.
theamk 3y ago
Nothing wrong with "one man armies" in the team context. There is a long list of tasks that needs to be done.. over same time period, one person will do 5 complex tasks (with tests and documentation), while the other will do just 1 task, and then spend even more time redoing it properly. Over time this produces funny effects, like super-big 20 point task done in few days because wrong person started working on it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

giantg2 3y ago

I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. I just want to be a good 1x engineer. Or good at anything in life realy.

datameta 3y ago
The truest 10x engineer I ever encountered was a memory firmware guy with ASIC experience who absolutely made sure to log off at 5 every day after really putting in the work. Go to guy for all parts of the codebase, even that which he didn't expressly touch.
- harryvederci 3y ago
  > I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. "The truest 10x engineer I ever encountered was..."
JimDabell 3y ago
The “10x engineer” comes from the observation that there is a 10x difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. By saying that you want to be a 1x engineer, you’re saying you want to be the least productive engineer possible. 1x is not the average, 1x is the worst.
- mathgradthrow 3y ago
  the worst engineer certainly has negative productivity, so I'm not sure that your explanation can possibly be the correct one.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    I’m explaining what the terms “10x” and “1x” mean, not asserting that the original observation is correct under all circumstances.
    - mathgradthrow 3y ago

throwitaway222 3y ago

No one reading this during the hours of 9-5 is a 10x.

randomdata 3y ago
Or is. If a 1x puts in an 8 hour day, a 10x only has to put in a 48 minute day. That leaves plenty of time to read this.
- simmerup 3y ago
  That’s a bad take because you’re assuming that developer is capable of replicating that * 10
  - adra 3y ago
    That's entirely the fundamental flaw of the Nx developer ethos to a tee. No individual will benchmark reliably against any other person of their same trade/craft perfectly over time. The mythical BS times developer is so over simplified to be a meaningless concept. Hire "unicorn" and get amazing results just isn't a guarantee. They just probably have better chance than average to make a higher impact, which is good enough for companies that are willing to pay Nx times average salaries to acquire them.
- sebastianz 3y ago
  His point is that smart and productive people are generally hard working, focused and diligent, which is how they get to be so experienced and productive. Hence not wasting time on social networks. > a 10x only has to put in a 48 minute day Nobody would call this person "10x".
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > His point is that smart and productive people are generally hard working, focused and diligent I don't think that tracks. Smart, productive, hard working people don't work 9-5. They work every hour they can, breaking only when they have pushed themselves to the limit. The limit can be hit at any hour. There is no magical property of the universe that gives people unlimited stamina during the hours of 9-5. > Nobody would call this person "10x". I'm not sure they would call anyone that, to be fair. A "10x developer" who also puts in 8 hours alongside the 1x developers isn't a 10x developer, he would be called a sucker.

didgetmaster 3y ago

It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does. Too often, management will focus more on the guy who works 12 hour days to accomplish 8 hours of real work than the guy who gets the same thing accomplished in an 8 hour day. Also, deviations from 'normal' are frowned upon. Taking time to improve the process isn't built into the schedule; so taking time to build a wheelbarrow is discouraged when they think you could be hauling buckets faster instead.

Terretta 3y ago
It's almost impossible to get executives to think in return on equity (“RoE”) for the future instead of “costs” measured in dollars and cents last quarter. Which is weird, since so many executives are working in a VC-funded environment, and internal work should be “venture funded” as well.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
happytiger 3y ago
That’s because most executives can’t understand technology deeply enough to know the difference.
- didgetmaster 3y ago
  Even when they are smart enough to know, they seem to have very short memories. While I don't consider myself to be a 10x engineer; I have certainly done a number of 10x things over my career. I worked for a company where I almost single handedly built a product that resulted in tens of millions of dollars in sales. I got a nice 'atta boy' for it, but my future ideas were often overridden by someone in management who 'knew better'. After the management changed, I found myself in a downsizing event once I started criticizing them for a lack of innovation.
  - 3y ago

andrei_says_ 3y ago

On my team, one of the main multipliers is understanding the need behind the requested implementation, and proposing alternative solutions - minimizing or avoiding code changes altogether. It helps that we work on internal tooling and are very close to the process and stakeholders. "Hmmm, there's another way to accomplish this" being the 10x. Doing things faster is not it.

switch007 3y ago
Exactly this. It’s why it’s so frustrating when product managers who think they’re above giving background run the show (the ones who think they’re your manager and are therefore too important to share that with you)

mettamage 3y ago

When I was in college, I've met a few people that coded _a lot_ faster than me. Typically, they started since they were 12 instead of 21 (like me). That's how 10x engineers exist, by the time they are 30, they have roughly 20 years of programming experience behind their belt instead of 10. Also, their professional experience is much greater. Sure, their initial jobs at 15 are the occassional weird gig for the uncle/aunt or cousin/nephew but they get picked up by professional firms at 18 and do a job next to their CS studies. At least, that's how it used to be. Not sure if this is still happening due to the new job environment, but this was the reality from around 2004 to 2018. For 10x engineers to exist, all it takes is a few examples. To me, everyone is in agreement that they seem to be rare. I point to a public 10x engineer. He'd never say it himself, but my guess is that this person is a 10x engineer [1]. If you disagree, I'm curious how you'd disagree. I'm just a blind man touching a part of the elephant [2]. I do not claim to see the whole picture. [1] https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ (the person who created JSLinux) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant - if you don't know the parable, it's a fun one!

QuercusMax 3y ago
Yup, that's been my experience as someone who asked for a C++ compiler for my 12th birthday, worked on a bunch of random websites and webapps for friends of the family, and spent some time at age 16-17 running a Beowulf cluster and attempting to help postdocs port their code to run on MPI (with mixed success). All thru my CS education I was writing tons of toy programs, contributing (as much as I could) toward OSS, reading lots of stuff on best practices, and leaning on my much older (12 years) brother who was working in the industry. He pointed me to Java and IntelliJ, told me to read Design Patterns (Gang of Four) and Refactoring (Fowler). I read Joel on Software religiously, even though he was a Microsoft guy and I was a hardcore Linux-head. By the time I joined my first real company at age 21, I was ready to start putting a lot of this stuff into place. I joined a small med device software company which had a great product but really no strong software engineering culture: zero unit tests, using CVS with no branches, release builds were done manually on the COO's workstation, etc. As literally the most junior person in the company I worked through all these things and convinced my much more senior colleagues that we should start using release branches instead of "hey everybody, please don't check in any new code until we get this release out the door". I wrote automated build scripts mostly for my own benefit, until the COO realized that he didn't have to worry about keeping a dev environment on his machine, now that he didn't code any more. I wrote a junit-inspired unit testing framework for the language we were using (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) - like Matlab but weirder). Without my work as a "10x junior engineer", the company would have been unable to scale to more than 3 or 4 developers. I got involved in hiring and made sure we were hiring people who were on board with writing tests. We finally turned into a "real" software company 2 or 3 years after I joined.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

10x developer is just a buzzword people throw around when they're trying to sell you something.

xnx 3y ago

Anyone can be a 10x engineer when they write something similar/identical to what they've written before. Other jobs are not like this. A plumber may only be 20% faster on the best days of their career.

ManuelKiessling 3y ago

What makes a car go fast? The brakes: https://manuel.kiessling.net/2011/04/07/why-developing-without-tests-is-like-driving-a-car-without-brakes-2/ https://manuel.kiessling.net/2011/04/07/why-developing-witho...

khazhoux 3y ago
Literally the opposite of what makes a car go fast :-)
- ManuelKiessling 3y ago
  Is it? How fast would you drive a car if I gave you the keys and told you „everything works perfectly fine, however the brakes have been removed“?
  - strken 3y ago
    This is the kind of half-correct pithy quote which falls down at the edge cases, e.g. if you're writing an algorithm that selects the lowest-speed car for new learner drivers and for some reason a blissfully unaware learner ends up in a McLaren GT with no brakes for lesson number 1.

BobbyTables2 3y ago

> People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to be possible, which then gives amazing leverage to deliver working software in a fraction of the time. I agree with the first part of your statement, but what really happens to such people? In my experience (sample size greater than one), they receive some kudos, but remain underpaid, never promoted, and are given more work under tight deadlines. At least until some of them are laid off along with lower performers. But for those who say that hard things are impossible, they seem to get along just fine. They merely declare such things as out-of-scope or lie about their roadmap.

bedobi 3y ago
> In my experience (sample size greater than one), they receive some kudos, but remain underpaid, never promoted, and are given more work under tight deadlines. At least until some of them are laid off along with lower performers. 100% agree, I've seen plenty of the best of the best get treated like trash and laid off at first sight of trouble on the horizon

hyperthesis 3y ago

I've always thought a x10 is one who sits back and sees a simpler way - like some math problems have an easy solution, if you can see it. Also: change the question; change the context (Alan Kay) (And absolutely not brute-force grinding themselves away)

whstl 3y ago
Agreed. You can brute force, but not for long.

strangattractor 3y ago

6.5 X 15 is only 97 hours per week not even close to the 400 hrs (5X40) per week of programming a 10X Rust programmer can provide. I jest but all this 10X stuff is getting ridiculous. They stayed in "Stealth" mode because they didn't have anything worth showing for 5 years. Doesn't sound all that productive to me. More likely what they are trying to do was hard and complicated and took a while to figure out.

joantune 3y ago
They're not boasting about their current productivity, they're boasting about the one they achieved at FoundationDB when they implemented the testing, which gave them the idea to build antithesis

devjab 3y ago

In my experience it often comes down to business processes. We have a guy in my extended team who knows everything about his side of the company. When I work with him I accomplish business altering deliveries in a very short amount of time, which after a week or two rarely needs to be touched again unless something in the business changes. He’s not a PO and we don’t do anything too formally because it’s just him, me and another developer + whatever business manager will benefit from the development (and a few testers from their tran). In many ways the way we work these projects are very akin to Team Topologies. At other times I’ll be assigned projects with regular POs, Architects and business employees who barely know what it is they are doing themselves, with poorly defined tasks and all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense “agile” process methods and well spend forever delivering nothing. So sometimes I’m a 50x developer delivering business altering changes. At other times I’m a useless cog in a sea of pseudo workers. I don’t particularly care, I get paid, but if management actually knew what was going on, and how to change it… well…

rukuu001 3y ago

How many organisations - of any kind, startups or enterprise or unicorns or whatever - will invest so much in effort that doesn't even touch the product. Before the product exists! I think the reluctance to invest effort in something that will give devs super-powers 6 months in the future is why we don't get all those 10x devs.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

This is a perceptive observation. In my experience, so called "10x" engineers are as productive as they are because they have a process by which they practice the development on software that anticipates future problems. As a result when they check something in, they spend very little time "debugging" or "fixing bugs" with code that does what they already need it to do. It is always very useful as an engineer to log your time, what are you working on "right now" and is it "new work" , "maintenance work", or "fixing work." Then for each log entry that isn't "new work" thinking about what you could have done that would have caught that problem before it was committed to the code base. I find it is much better to evaluate engineers based on how often they are solving the same problem that they had before vs creating new stuff. That ratio, for me, is the essence of the Nx engineer (for 0.1 < N < 10) The point that Wilson makes that having infrastructure/tools that push that ratio further from "repair" work to "new work" is hugely empowering to an organization.

dclowd9901 3y ago

Yep. Often I find our most accelerative work is stuff that makes testing changes easy (a very simple to bootstrap staging environment) or creates a lot of guarantees (typescript).

TrackerFF 3y ago

Was it 50x productivity due to 10x engineers, or 50x productivity due to optimized company structure? (edit: obviously, these do not need to be mutually exclusive - it's a sum of all the different parts) It's easy to bog down even the best Nx engineers if you keep them occupied with endless bullshit tasks, meetings, (ever) changing timelines, and all that. Kind of like having a professional driver drive a sportscar through a racetrack, versus the streets of Boston.

AlwaysRock 3y ago

The 10x developer I know basically DOES seem to do 10x more than anyone else on our team. But they are working on a team that does relatively simple work and are by far the most senior person on that team. It's like how an NBA player would be a 10x player on a college basketball team. Great to work with them but If I was in their shoes I don't know how enjoyable/engaging the work would be.