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"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week." plus plus plus plus plus to this.
Most 10x engineers I've met are usually very creative and care deeply about the user experience and keeping code maintainable over time. Most 1x developers just care about getting the job done regardless of care or code quality, which in my experience has led to conflict.
Most 1x engineers/developers care deeply about users and the end product, and also likes to keep the code well maintained and performant, so they can do their peaceful work and go home, while not making the life of the user any more miserable.
Most 10x engineers are too brilliant and remain busy rocking the boat and doing so many mind blowing things at any given time that the destruction trail is only materialising slowly once their presence has faded for a while and the remnants are being pieced together.
I think, we equate the frenzy with 10x(productivity & excellence) while the less creative and cautious ones tend to be the most valuable over long term with most boring stuff.
Of course to each their own, but the too many destructions of the 10x stars had made me very weary these days.
I don't think decent skills and ordinary expertise gets you that, especially "move fast" on top of the other things. But the convenient thing about "normal" is I can move the goal posts wherever and it sounds valid.
The article also did not say how often the normal engineers produce bugs of varying severity, so I guess it's possible to move fast and create a manageable amount of bugs?
Most 10x engineers I've met are usually very creative and care deeply about the user experience and keeping code maintainable over time. Most 1x developers just care about getting the job done regardless of care or code quality, which in my experience has led to conflict.
Which works for some time, or when extensively coached, but eventually they move since their time is oh so precious and now you have the rest of the team to work with their work. Not that great.
Then people wonder or complain when business doesn't appreciate devs. How would you look at folks who are critical to your success yet often don't have your company's best interest at the center of their efforts.
To use your terms, those 1x devs always end up maintaining and evolving that code of 10x guys. Their velocity with changes is massively lower and error rate is significantly higher compared to code created by 1x devs. This is what business sees and there is not much love for that.
This is a healthy perspective that hopefully avoids some of the controversy around the 10x label. Any improvement you make to how the team works together, be it CI process, sharing/evaluating ideas, code reviews, design, anything, is multiplied by the team size/responsibilities. Maybe high-functioning teams are part of what enable the 10x outputs that perpetuates the meme.
From what I remember in mythical man month it's sort of addressed there (different roles/support roles being just as critical as others) and recently reading "soul of a new machine" it was clear how dependent even the most skilled roles were on the other members.
How to hire and build a 10x engineering team remains a challenging problem however!
I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field. These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the r…
>"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week." I don't think decent skills and ordinary expertise gets you that, especially "move fast" on…
Every 10x engineer I've known has carried entire teams of normal engineers. ymmv but I've seen probably 5 instances of this and 0 instances of teams of normal engineers being super productive.
I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field. These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the r…
Didn't we pass the rubicon on that in the early 2010s? I personally don't feel that its "like" finance but that its the exact same behaviors from the exact same set of people.
Once tech stopped being a bunch of nerds in a basement and started being a source of wealth and power, it attracted a whole slew of intelligent and wealth seeking individuals who would have gone to wall street previously. Its not like the math skills don't have a heavy overlap already.
And well, now that they're here, we see all the same power games being played with the same results