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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the same way, anyone who does not believe in the 10x engineer has just never met one. Sometimes the software they produce is absolutely stunning.
Or, alternatively, the 0.1x engineer and the -10x engineer. (Or worse, the -10x PM.)
"If you find a project where only one person know what is going on, chances are that person is not good at writing code for humans, not that is a coding god." This is hard for many to grasp, but if you get the opportunity to lead enough teams it will become clear. And it makes sense, if you think about it. An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure…
This part at least, I agree with. Whenever I see code like this it is a symptom of a larger product development issue.
- unreasonable deadlines
- overpromising to external clients
- no coding standards (enforced by linter and code review)
- no automated testing
- no code review process
- using new languages/technologies without first gaining some experience about best practices
Early on, a startup definitely needs engineers that are going to work autonomously, cut corners as needed, not be a perfectionist, etc. The technical cofounder/CTO/team leader should still be setting up a culture of high quality code. Coding styles and some automated testing make it easier to move quickly and ramp up new team members or for old team members to circle back to old code.
After reading that sentence, I thought to myself, "How long did I go from the start of my career before meeting someone of whom I genuinely thought, 'this person is so bad they should definitely be fired asap'?". In my case, I think the answer is somewhere around 20 years.
My takeaway from this is that at even with ~18 years of experience, my former self would probably not have appreciated the importance of this advice, as I had rarely or never encountered such a person thus far.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, alternatively, the 0.1x engineer and the -10x engineer. (Or worse, the -10x PM.)
Yeah. Engineers fall on a distribution. It's just that simple.
> Even more important than finding great engineers is to avoid bad ones. After reading that sentence, I thought to myself, "How long did I go from the start of my career before meeting someone of whom I genuinely thought, 'this person is so bad they should definitely be fired asap'?". In my case, I think the answer is somewhere around 20 years. My takeaway from this is that at even with ~18 years of experience, my fo…
I’ve been fortunate in my career thus far, since I was about 14 or so, to have always been in the company of at least one “10x”’er on each of my teams, as the cliche goes. They’re dispersed through various companies nowadays - Stripe, Twitch, Google, FB, Discord, etc etc. But it was interesting and beneficial for me to work alongside them if only because I had decent role models to follow. This article first puts up…
I feel the same way, anyone who does not believe in the 10x engineer has just never met one. Sometimes the software they produce is absolutely stunning.
Food for thought: The interpretation of a 10x engineer is not consistent. Putting my manager hat on, I ask: Can I replace 10 of my average engineers with this one person? The answer is never "yes".
That's because a team does more than just technical stuff. There's documentation, dealing with customers, bureaucratic stuff, etc. If you don't do these well, much of your brilliant engineering gains will go to waste. A brilliant engineer may be harder to replace than the average, but he/she is not a 10x engineer. Perhaps a 2x.
> Even more important than finding great engineers is to avoid bad ones. After reading that sentence, I thought to myself, "How long did I go from the start of my career before meeting someone of whom I genuinely thought, 'this person is so bad they should definitely be fired asap'?". In my case, I think the answer is somewhere around 20 years. My takeaway from this is that at even with ~18 years of experience, my fo…
I don't know how many Jeff Deans and John Carmacks the OP would turn away in order to avoid a bad engineer on the team, but for me the answer is zero.
Whether or not "10x programmers" exist, I can say for sure that 1/10th programmers exist. I know a few in that category. And it really amounts to the same thing.
Not in this context. The term “10x programmer” comes from an observation that there is a factor of ten variation between the best and the worst programmers. So the worst programmers in this context are 1x, and 1/10th is meaningless. People hear “10x” and assume it’s ten times the average, but that’s not the case.
More information here: https://www.construx.com/blog/productivity-variations-among-...