There are extremely competent programmers (10x) like there are outstanding players in sports and music. They do have an outsized impact on the projects they work on. However, they are also extremely rare. The problem, IMHO, comes from cult-startups where they think they can (a) identify these people in an interview (b) build a team of only 10x programmers.
This results in (c) calling a whole lot of average programmers they hired as 10x programmers because of (a). After all, they are smart and their interview process is infallible.
So, if you meet one of those rare folks, enjoy the intellectual banter :).
Then good luck hiring a well sized team when you’ve set the expectation that everyone needs to be a genius to contribute. A successful startup needs to either attract only the best engineers or build itself so that most of the work can be done by merely good engineers following the company’s engineering culture.
10x engineers are a myth when it comes to productivity working within a team. There are absolutely 10x engineers when they're working on a project more or less completely solo.
Yeah, but that's also different from how people, especially management, tend to conceptualize 10x engineers. You don't spot the 10x engineer by looking for the one who accomplishes 10x what other engineers do. You spot them by looking for the team that's accomplishing 5x what other teams are, and then finding the "glue" person on that team.
When I look at 10x engineers who look like 10x engineers what I typically find instead is a 3x engineer leaving a path of destruction behind them. If you give everyone else impostor syndrome and difficult processes they slow down, and you look better than you are. Than you deserve.
The real heroes are the ones who make everyone else look better. But some managers only figure out who that is when they quit or when the business lays off the wrong guy because Steve produces less than Sarah, but that’s because Steve is helping people all the time, including Sarah.
I have met 10x engineers. They solve a problem in an hour that takes me all day and which someone else might never be able to solve. They identify and solve problems I couldn't even begin to tackle. In that sense, they're not really 10x but qualitatively superior.
A+ comment. I've been hearing this idea that "there is no such thing as a 10x engineer" for almost a decade now and from the very first moment I heard it I considered it one of the most definitively untrue ideas circulating in the tech industry. In fact, there are 100x engineers.
Most the criticisms of the "10x engineer" thing I've seen were more about this expectation that everyone can be 10x, when they're more the exception than the rule. Your average programmer is just that: average.
The reason people say it's a myth is because the study that purported to identify this concept was found to have an extremely small population and confounding factors. In addition if I remember correctly it tried to do this identification by using a contrived programming problem.
There are obviously software devs who are more productive than the average. This is true of every skill. The myth is thinking that (a) companies can somehow identify these people in advance, and (b) it is better to prioritize building a team with these supposed rock stars than it is to build a team of potentially average developers who know how to work together, and then properly manage, support & motivate them. A team of ten properly supported 1.5x programmers will beat out one 10x programmer every time. And in many cases the "I'm a 10x dev" personality type does not play well with others.
I'm a firm believer that any genuinely interested, motivated and at least mildly intelligent dev can be made highly productive by finding the right fit. It's far more important for companies to focus on fit and on ensuring that their own managers actually know how to manage than on trying to tap into a hidden stream of 10x devs.
I guess it boils down to the fact that I think many companies absolve themselves and their mgmt team of blame for poor performance by saying "well we just haven't been able to identify 10x devs yet." They expect to be able to hire a single employee who will save the day for them, rather than hiring and training good mgmt.
First, the "I'm a 10x dev" personality type is not a 10x dev. Arrogance is a sign of insecurity.
Second, I don't think a team of ten 1.5x programmers will beat out a 10x programmer. You either have the depth of understanding and imagination or you don't. Take Linus Torvalds, for instance -- I would say he is a 100x programmer, or perhaps a 10,000x programmer, since he is the author of both Git and Linux -- good luck trying to replicate that contribution with a "well managed team". It is similar in many areas -- 10 guys with Math PhDs do not make one Einstein.
In the context of hiring for a business that is developing a CRUD app, you're usually trying to differentiate between 1x programmers and 0.1x programmers, however -- 10x programmers aren't often looking for work.
Pretty much, it's not about grinding out assembly line CRUD work but vision. Domas is another good example if you ever watch his Black Hat presentations on x86 backdoors he's able to approach topics that are not just technically challenging but in a manner that simply would not be attainable for many.
The irony is most companies doing routine CRUD/simple business apps probably shouldn't hire such people as it's a waste and likely causes bad outcomes and perpetuates the stereotype.
I’ve met people other people called 10x engineers. Once you looked soberly at the development process that illusion has faded every time.
Part of the problem with the myth is that as originally formulated it’s meant to be between your worst and best engineer, and whoever came up with that idea is an idiot, inattentive, sheltered, or all three.
Why? Because the worst engineers help the team by calling in sick. They have negative outcomes all the time, which means everyone else in the team is infinity times as productive.
What the rest of us think is 10x versus an adequate developer, and there are almost none of those. Are there people who can work solo and produce as much as a team of 10? Sure, but that’s because of the communication overhead. Can that person join a team of ten and double their output? Only if they are a unicorn among unicorns. The easiest way to double the output of a team is to double the output of the team members. And that doesn’t make you look more productive than them. If you’re not very careful it makes you look less productive.
I've long felt that there's a relatively simple formula for productivity:
Productivity = (Time * Effort)^Talent
People like Buckminster Fuller come to mind. Especially because of this quote of his:
>“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
That also depends on the X, from my experience working at FAANGs, startups, etc... I have never seen a 10x engineer in good teams, I have only seen "10x engineers" on teams without great engineers. The comparison with sports and music is pretty silly, as those are environment where the winner(s) take all (there can only be one Billie Eillish (lol) even tho there are many singers who are better), engineering is often a team effort. In the other hand, the best engineers I have seen, just spend more time than anybody else working on a problem, and often are the ones who like to show off more, and very often lack the skills in other areas of life.
I’ve seen too many prolific engineers who destroy the confidence and productivity of people around them. These are not people you want to aspire to be.
Yeah, I also think is way more common in smaller companies. Also extreme toxicity around tools, editors, .... stuff like "10x engineers" only use Vim (the classic "i dont need a mouse, thats for normies"), the command line, Arch Linux, etc... In bigger companies, with talented engineer, no single engineer can claim to be the best/10x-er or any nonsense like that, because whatever he does, can also be done(and often improved) by the team. That's why I said that depends on the X. You can certainly have a 10Y engineer where Y = 1/10*X;
If we get to expand the definition from a software engineer on a team to a business founder, do we also get to call the fiber optics 10X engineers? Is a truck driver delivering laptops a 10X engineer?
It's a coping mechanism like lying on the couch watching the Olympics and getting angry that some people are able to push themselves to incredible feats instead of being happy for them.
Never understood that mindset, when I see 100x engineering feats like TempleOS or αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblεs it inspires me to learn more and think outside the box.
