3 ms·
The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but
by aleqs 4mo ago
The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but even interns can and often do provide good input and spot mistakes made by seniors. The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process).
- throwaway7783 4mo agoEven if we forget "rockstar", there are certainly different levels of engineers. More experience doesn't automatically mean better either. That is not to say experience doesn't matter. It matters quite a bit. Sure , good interns can sometimes have good feedback or spot mistakes. But not consistently enough. All of this to say that it's not just experience that makes one a better engineer.
- aleqs 4mo agoExperience is one of the only objective signals we have, but you're right it's not the only one. I've seen plenty great junior engineers and interns, and plenty of incompetent staff/principal engineers.
- throwaway7783 4mo agoTrue, it is the only objective signal, but as you have observed as well, it is also a very poor one.
- misnome 4mo agoFor the most part there aren’t 10x engineers But there are certainly 0.1x engineers
- rjbwork 4mo agoand -10x
- klabb3 4mo agoThis is such an obvious observation that I’m surprised to find it often missing. 0.1X is nothing compared to the destruction (ie negative X) you can do with the right combination of recklessness and managerial pressure. Definitely happens with engineers. Perhaps even more with PMs.
- trumpdong 4mo agoI've long thought a 10x engineer is one with just the right amount of analysis paralysis - not too much or too little. It's not that they're 10x engineers, it's that everyone else is 0.1x due to a confluence of reasons. And the ones we call 0.1x are 0.01x.
- trumpdong 4mo agoSome famous examples of a "10x developer" state: Linus Torvalds writing Git, Brendan Eich writing JavaScript. Somewhat less famously, I get that feeling often when I stop thinking and start doing on an electronics project, a wooden shed or even a cosplay. Every hackathon ever, same principle - stop thinking, start doing. But it's only a 10x state if you're doing the right thing, otherwise it's a -10x state, and that means you need to have already done the right amount of thinking and have a good intuition for what you're trying to do. (As long as you can recognize a failed experiment and revert, risk of being -10x isn't that terrible)
- rightbyte 4mo agoThere certainly are 10x engineers just that they get most of the x from turning down bad ideas and saving work.
- Fargren 4mo agoThe study that defined the 10x engineer defined him as 10x as good as the worst engineer. If there is a 0.1x engineer, and a 1x engineer, that 1x engineer is the very definition of a 10x engineer.
- mancerayder 4mo ago>The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process). I love it! And posts on HN about Big Ideas and uses corpspeak to justify driving people to long hours. The engineer who's picked up talking points of his employer because he's well-paid and trapped on the spectrum, making it hard to comprehend a life of Play outside of work.