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For the most part there aren’t 10x engineers But there are certainly 0.1x engineers
by misnome 4mo ago
For 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.