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Busting the 10x software engineer myth

swarmia.com

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Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#111

Post by hawk_ »

IAmNotAFix wrote: post #104

10x software engineers are mostly 10x problem solvers who happen to be programmers. The driving attitude is refusing to work hard to accomplish something of low significance, which is mostly done thanks to: finding clever solutions, reducing feedback loops when debugging or testing, gaining proper understanding of systems to avoid empirical tweaking, asking around quickly when getting stuck, and also cleverly navigat…

> cleverly navigating company politics in order to ship something in environments

conversely, company politics can be a reason why someone could be 10x in one setup and a complete dud in another.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#112

Post by prepend »

strken wrote: post #100
karmakaze wrote: post #53

Anyone who doubts 10x devs exist either never met a real one or is merely protecting their ego. Software development is complex enough that I'd go so far as to say there's even 100x range even among those considered competent. We accept this range in sports and art, what's the hangup? It seems like someone who just learned deductive reasoning and feels like they could now understand the universe then someone says the…

I don't think anyone really doubts that some engineers will work an order of magnitude or more faster than others on a given task. They just think it's a misleading way to think about performance, which likely falls on a unimodal curve within your organisation, and likely differs by task. How do you know you're looking at a 10x developer instead of a 2x, a 9x, an 11x, a 500x, a 0.2x, or a 0.5x? The premise gives the…

> How do you know you're looking at a 10x developer instead of a 2x, a 9x, an 11x, a 500x, a 0.2x, or a 0.5x?

This is the hard part, isn’t it. It’s hard to tell beforehand, but if you’re skilled enough you can look at someone’s contribution history and see what they’ve done over the past years. It’s not perfect, but it helps.

Similar to how you review a 10x artist, just look at their work.

I don’t think asking people if they are great is very useful.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#114

Post by [deleted] »

widdershins wrote: post #107
goto11 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who thinks all bugs will go away if the code is just rewritten in the hipster niche language de-jour, is probably a 0.1x developer. They may work hard but don't solve any real problems for the business and leave a mess to future maintainers who have to spend time debugging the forgotten hipster languages of yesteryear. Do you think the developers who rewrote everything in Dart or CoffeeScript a few years ago…

To be fair, the grandparent said 'runtime errors', not 'bugs'. And it is a stated goal of the Elm language that runtime exceptions thrown from the compiled Javascript should be impossible. As far as I know, they have succeeded in that goal. How this relates to 10x or not I don't know - I'm not sure the discussion is a productive one without further context. It might be that for some tasks, Elm really does provide a h…

[deleted]

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#115

Post by ptero »

The article seems to make and fight a strawman argument, making a supposed 10x engineer a problem for information sharing, teamwork, etc.

In my experience, it is quite the opposite: while very few of the 10x engineer are indeed "leave me alone to solve hard problems; figure out yourself how to maintain my solutions within the enterprise", the majority makes simple, robust designs that are easier, not harder for the team to understand and maintain. And when they leave, they generally leave behind a system that is stable and does not need day-to-day meddling from a senior engineer, which gives enough time to find a replacement. My 2c.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#117

Post by smichel17 »

tempodox wrote: post #22
dijit wrote: post #3

I know "10x engineers" exist; some people are fakes and put forward things that look like they have high impact but are actually a bit shoddy. Some people like to be present and suck up. But some people really do just work hard, smart and have deep passion for what they're doing- and importantly: pride, which makes the quality of the content great too. Some of the best engineers I know "visit" bits of code or infrast…

“Adding people to a late project makes it later”. Equally, replacing high performers with multiple people wouldn't work most of the time.

Are we sure they're not actually the exact same problem?

Hypothesis: the "10x" developer does not actually have 10x the output of a single average developer, but rather the same output as 10 average developers working together (and having much of their productivity eaten up by coordination overhead).

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#118

Post by cheschire »

z3t4 wrote: post #99
bjourne wrote: post #97

This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at…

The problem is that you can't measure a developer. So you can't say someone is 10x faster or better. If you add a bench-mark like how many LOC is written per day, most will exceed at that benchmark, but the overall quality will go down.

Schrodinger's project management: developers are measurable as long as they don't know they are being measured.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#119

Post by ridaj »

IMO the 10x engineer is not someone who is 10x more productive than their peers. It's the person who will identify and solve critical engineering design questions far in advance, such that if you took them out of the team, the team would be 10x less valuable.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#120

Post by ggambetta »

"10x engineers" definitely do exist. Anyone who doesn't believe in 10x engineers just hasn't met one yet.

I've had the pleasure of working with two 10x engineers. One of them is a problem-solving and execution machine. I could understand what he did, and I think that I could have done the same, only taking 10x longer.

The other one... the other one isn't just a "faster me". His brain works on a qualitatively different way than mine. I probably couldn't have come up with the things he came up with, even with 10x or 100x more time.

These guys are also incredibly humble and nice, and hilariously funny. Fantastic humans all around. Stu, Matt, I miss you guys!

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