I’m working with a 10x engineer who’s most likely autistic and produces more than everyone else. He’s taking the team down because he steals work from others and nobody can learn the codebase. It’s also really bad code so he’s the only one that can understand it and refuses to document or explain what is going on. Is it rare or is it a common situation?
Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
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Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#2Yeah we have the same coworker. He diminishes other people’s result and make it impossible to scale the team by taking over work than others could do and learn from. When he’s expressing his opinion that nobody seems to be able to do the work, it’s pretty much that he’s not willing to train the other engineers to do the work. What does the company do? They either listen to him, fire people, and waste indefinite time trying to hire someone who can match the 10x engineer’s skills, or they try to remove the 10x engineer as the bottleneck that prevents the team from growing (also, if they don’t act fast enough everybody has left except the 10x engineer)
Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#3You're not working with a 10x engineer. It sounds like you're working with someone who may think they're a 10x engineer, but they're likely just reducing the effectiveness of the rest of the team. Hopefully your company/team's management is aware of the distinction. If not, you and the team need to communicate this to them (in a tactful manner).
I've worked with people who were truly 10x engineers and others who just thought they were 10x engineers. The actual ones did this by succeeding in the context of the broader team. The ones deluding themselves just made everyone else miserable, and then left messes to clean up when they left.
Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#4I suspect writing bad code with poor documentation has nothing to do with autism. I'd suggest don't treat him different than any other employee.
If he steals work he steals work, less to be done by you. If he crashes and burns, so be it.
Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#5I don't know about autistic IANAD - but I've met the behaviour in several companies. Often the code was bad and not complete, used new technology to tackle a problem, then person moved on to new code/technoligies when they get bored, leaving ruins. Had always the highest standing with management because he was an "achiever".
Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#6[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#7The title is not a question, but a statement. There are no evidence more than this anecdote to support this statement, and it's a very harsh one, putting all autistic people in one basket - despite the likely chance this has more to do with the person than autism.
Please be more careful when putting out/framing your personal thoughts than this. It's the same category as racism.
Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#8I think if you remove the word “autistic” from the title then almost everyone on HN would have worked with someone like your description.
I’ve worked with a few. They’re usually solid over-achievers in general, and have gotten by with their toxic personalities due to their above-average output. They’re a burden on those around them but management just see the output so don’t really care.
I’ve quit jobs due to people like this.
Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#9You're not working with a 10x engineer. It sounds like you're working with someone who may think they're a 10x engineer, but they're likely just reducing the effectiveness of the rest of the team. Hopefully your company/team's management is aware of the distinction. If not, you and the team need to communicate this to them (in a tactful manner). I've worked with people who were truly 10x engineers and others who just…
I think they are different definition of 10x engineer and OP’s definition is someone who writes a lot of code and understand the stack.
Re: Ask HN: Autistic employees think they’re better than everyone
#10I suspect writing bad code with poor documentation has nothing to do with autism. I'd suggest don't treat him different than any other employee. If he steals work he steals work, less to be done by you. If he crashes and burns, so be it.
What if he’s the supposedly tech lead who is not interest in leading and growing the team?