3 ms·

It's greed really - everyone wants to hire 10x engineers, but it's not like you're going to pay them 10x of course.

_yosefk 12y ago
Well, if you pay 10x for 10x more productivity you don't gain much, do you?.. Can't blame 'em for not bothering to look for a rarity for no gain.
- greenyoda 12y ago
  If one person can really do the work of ten, you can save money on overhead: - Fewer managers - a group of 10 will probably require a programming lead who spends some fraction of their time not coding. - One tenth the amount of office space and hardware. - Only paying for one person's health insurance instead of ten peoples'. - Vastly reduced communications overhead - a team of 10 people is going to spend a lot of time communicating with each other to insure that everyone is doing what they need to be doing. So I'm guessing you'll come out ahead even if you do pay ten times more for ten times the productivity. But companies rarely even pay twice as much for a developer who is exceptionally productive. The downside of having one person doing the work of ten is that it's a disaster when the person decides to quit - it's the equivalent of a whole team of people simultaneously quitting.
  - _yosefk 12y ago
    Well, yeah, if you actually pay <10x when all is counted but get an actual 10x more, then you will have gained, but grandparent said "they won't pay 10x for 10x." My tongue is in my cheek or some other such place right now because I kinda find this 10x business a bit funny, given that we can't even roughly quantify productivity. The thing I do believe in is that some people fit some kinds of work so well that it's silly to consider many other seemingly similarly qualified people as a practical alternative; as in, a hammer is good at hammering and it's not a question of it being 10x better than a shoe or 5x, it's just silly to hammer with a shoe, just don't do it. This is obvious but if phrased as "hammers are 10x shoes", it loses its obviousness and gains ridiculousness.
- nerfhammer 12y ago
  If it's profitable to hire a 1x engineer it should be profitable to hire a 10x engineer at 10x pay. Suppose the earning/engineer multiplier is 4x: if you make 4x for each 1x engineer, you should make 40x from a 10x engineer. And, currently the earnings/engineer multiplier in most well known bay area tech companies is enormous.
- Dewie 12y ago
  Still sounds like a win to me. Think of The Mythical Man-Month. Do you want a kitchen with 10 chefs and the coordination that demands, or a kitchen with 1 chef that is just as productive as the raw sum of the 10 chefs? Assuming that the productivity of each chef was tested in isolation.
coroxout 12y ago
Or give them an office to think their 10x thoughts in when you can have them elbow to elbow and back to back with your most chatty, whistling, foot-tapping, phone-using employees.

Well, if you pay 10x for 10x more productivity you don't gain much, do you?.. Can't blame 'em for not bothering to look for a rarity for no gain.

greenyoda 12y ago
If one person can really do the work of ten, you can save money on overhead: - Fewer managers - a group of 10 will probably require a programming lead who spends some fraction of their time not coding. - One tenth the amount of office space and hardware. - Only paying for one person's health insurance instead of ten peoples'. - Vastly reduced communications overhead - a team of 10 people is going to spend a lot of time communicating with each other to insure that everyone is doing what they need to be doing. So I'm guessing you'll come out ahead even if you do pay ten times more for ten times the productivity. But companies rarely even pay twice as much for a developer who is exceptionally productive. The downside of having one person doing the work of ten is that it's a disaster when the person decides to quit - it's the equivalent of a whole team of people simultaneously quitting.
- _yosefk 12y ago
  Well, yeah, if you actually pay <10x when all is counted but get an actual 10x more, then you will have gained, but grandparent said "they won't pay 10x for 10x." My tongue is in my cheek or some other such place right now because I kinda find this 10x business a bit funny, given that we can't even roughly quantify productivity. The thing I do believe in is that some people fit some kinds of work so well that it's silly to consider many other seemingly similarly qualified people as a practical alternative; as in, a hammer is good at hammering and it's not a question of it being 10x better than a shoe or 5x, it's just silly to hammer with a shoe, just don't do it. This is obvious but if phrased as "hammers are 10x shoes", it loses its obviousness and gains ridiculousness.
nerfhammer 12y ago
If it's profitable to hire a 1x engineer it should be profitable to hire a 10x engineer at 10x pay. Suppose the earning/engineer multiplier is 4x: if you make 4x for each 1x engineer, you should make 40x from a 10x engineer. And, currently the earnings/engineer multiplier in most well known bay area tech companies is enormous.
Dewie 12y ago
Still sounds like a win to me. Think of The Mythical Man-Month. Do you want a kitchen with 10 chefs and the coordination that demands, or a kitchen with 1 chef that is just as productive as the raw sum of the 10 chefs? Assuming that the productivity of each chef was tested in isolation.

coroxout 12y ago

Or give them an office to think their 10x thoughts in when you can have them elbow to elbow and back to back with your most chatty, whistling, foot-tapping, phone-using employees.