“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

That is a nice theory. But if someone is doing 10x more work, they get 10x more emails, and 10x more mentoring. They are not rude, just very very tired!

10x devs do not do mentoring and "social skills", because it does not scale. They write readme, maybe record a video, and move on to next task. If you have a question, send email and you get response latter! Sitting all day on meetings kills productivity very fast!

Buttering someone up, just because they are lazy to study documentation, and somehow they have power over you, is not a team work!!!

Once you’re paid some minimum threshold you stop caring about money and start caring about your legacy.

Taking pride in your craft would mean having enough self-respect to both not burn your soul out for the sake of a corporation that wants to make you redundant and using it in a direction that directly benefits you.

I've been in the industry long enough now to see those 10x engineers having pride in their work get their mindset shattered because John from financials thinks they can juice the next quarter by laying them off.

If you want to have pride in your work as a supposed 10x engineer, work at 2x or 3x and save the remaining for yourself.

> something unique and different about software engineering

how much does the strength/weight ratio of building materials improve every year? how much does the price/quality ratio of building materials fall every year?

software engineering is working with technology where compute capacity was doubling and price/performance was halving every two years for decades. this rate of change has slowed, but in a world where the price of everything else inflates, software is a rare field that works with a continually deflating capital base.

the uniqueness of software development is real and based on underlying physical/economic factors that exist in very few industries.

software developers are not unique. they are still human. but the profession is unique and the financial incentives are unique.

consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time wins on average, but because the incentives are large, many people will take the risk to get exceptional rewards.

i approach software development like a professional athlete. i work on optimizing every aspect of my performance (physical, mental, social, technical) to be the very best i can be. anyone who applies this level of dedication in any field will be highly successful, but it requires dedication, sacrifice, and risk, which many people are not willing to accept.

the world is full of exceptional software and algorithms designed by unique individuals who developed things nobody else could or would. there is a reason why mathematical discoveries are named after the people who discovered them.

building software for large corporations necessarily revolves around median-level teams, because mean-reversion always happens at scale, but that is also why a great deal of technical innovation takes place outside of large corporations.

Sometimes I feel useless compared to other people - usually while I'm struggling with something and seem to be achieving nothing. This talk of xN programmers absolutely hits on all my insecurities.

Then other days I solve 3 problems for other people which are easy for me because I have bashed my head against those particular kinds of walls before. I suddenly feel worthy again.

I'm productive when I know exactly what I'm going to do but getting to that point is hard and looks like I'm doing nothing. I find that people who are more productive than me often just don't hesitate and take all the easy exits that I waste time worrying about. I can't give up on my style because I always feel happier with the result.

Sometimes they're just faster because they're repeating a successful pattern they've used before.

I have often had to fix code written by "reputedly" very productive people and it's not a rule but more than a few times it has been very brittle and unmaintainable.

What I'm saying is that speed is usually NOT magic. It's achieved in a particular way and that is sometimes not good....but you tend to find out later.