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Busting the 10x software engineer myth

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Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#141

Post by long_time_gone »

alzaeem wrote: post #32

I work in ML engineering, and I’ve seen people work on a problem for the better part of a year with little to show for it. The non-progress gets on leadership’s radar, so even more resources get directed to crack what should be a solvable but non-trivial problem. An engineer who could have solved this problem without a fuss within a month or two is easily a 10x engineer. Not because they work 10x faster, but through…

==An engineer who could have solved this problem without a fuss within a month or two is easily a 10x engineer.==

They also need the trust of their superiors to be listened to in the first place. A 10x engineer isn’t helpful if management doesn’t take their advice.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#142

Post by RHSman2 »

thecupisblue wrote: post #45
j7ake wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to give a concrete example: no amount of software engineers can be hired to produce comparable work of an expert cartoonist except by dumb luck. Throwing 1000 engineers won’t solve the problem. I imagine within the tech world there are tasks that are ill defined and a small subset of engineers can solve, but a typical engineer may not have the background to solve it.

>no amount of software engineers can be hired to produce comparable work of an expert cartoonist except by dumb luck. You actually hit this nail quite on the head with the example. The "10x engineers" get a lot of their "10x"-ness from creativity - most I've met are cartoonists, painters, musicians, writers, cooks - artists in general that love software as a way of expressing themselves and earning good money. The be…

This has helped me to understand this very problem (which I didn’t really know had a name)

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#143

Post by mgkimsal »

It's a completely context-dependent assessment.

I was part of a team a few years back where I was certainly not a 10x dev. It was a team of... around 8-9 folks. 5-6 devs, PM, testers. There were jr/sr divides, but it was relatively smooth. My 20+ years of experience were helpful, but I wasn't 10x more productive than some of the lesser experienced folks on the team, and given the constraints and role I was in, there really wasn't a way to achieve that.

I've been on other projects where the experience level and other factors really exacerbate differences, and I've absolutely been "10x" in comparison to the others on the project.

The larger problems may come in with how you're treated, how you're viewed by management, etc.

"In a controlled environment, the variation between most software engineers is much more modest."

Well yes, but we don't usually work in controlled environments. With similar backgrounds/experiences, and strict project management controls in place, there's going to be far less variance possible.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#144

Post by thinkharderdev »

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…

Yeah, this is an important point when thinking about it from an organization perspective. I've been at places where they "only wanted to hire rockstars" which was beyond stupid. By definition 10x developers are rare and are going to have a lot of options when it comes to where they work. So if you depend on some member of the team carrying a hugely disproportionate amount of the work, then you are in for a rude awakening when they jump ship.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#145

Post by fastball »

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…

Wouldn't winning 99/100 be a 100x chess player?

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#146

Post by dijit »

m12k wrote: post #139
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…

On the flipside, I've met "10x engineers" who always prioritized working on highly visible and strategic new features, and excelled at shipping them as fast as possible, even if it meant racking up massive technical debt. By doing this, they effectively did produce 10x as much in the eyes of management, and got promoted and rewarded in kind. The technical debt they racked up then got paid by everyone else that had to…

> On the flipside, I've met "10x engineers" who always prioritized working on highly visible and strategic new features, and excelled at shipping them as fast as possible, even if it meant racking up massive technical debt.

I start my comment with an intent to indicate that these people are not what is meant when people say 10x. (maybe it's what some people think of when lambasting "10x" developers).

If you think you're a 10x engineer: you're not, you wouldn't see yourself as better, you'd see yourself as passionate.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#147

Post by peoplefromibiza »

latch wrote: post #135
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…

I totally agree, but I think you can use examples closer to home. Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics (quality, cost, time to deliver) than I could. Still too far? Pick your field, there'll be experts. You can get even closer to home. After 20 year, I really feel like I'm at least 10x developer across a number of metrics (e.g., value to my employer, amount of complexity I can ma…

> Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics

But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness.

Sometimes being 10x is only a matter of being free to help the best you can.

EDIT: where Carmack shows that he is well above average is not in coding, but in being extremely pragmatic and thous being able to extract good, almost unbiased, information out of every discussion, even the more unpleseant ones.

---

Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn't actually be good.

"I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good." It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.

People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn't want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that "Steve appreciates vigorous conversation".

Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn't appreciate that. The Steve Jobs "hero / sh*head" rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#148

Post by xiphias2 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #79
xiphias2 wrote: post #21

Satoshi Nakamoto is a great example of a 1000x engineer (or a bunch of 1000x engineers) with an impact measured in trillions of USD, but the article may be right that he wouldn't have been able to have that impact inside a big financial organization, as his engineering is disruptive.

If you measure his impact in turns of extra CO2 emitted you might take a different view.

Isn't that true for any trillion dollar industry? Industries use energy whether you like it or not, and it's unfair to make such a big deal from one just because it's adopted in a different pattern than others.

Agriculture, mining, electricity, transportation, defence...all have CO2 emissions, and it's extremely hard to get rid of it.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#149

Post by thinkharderdev »

jmchuster wrote: post #18
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…

If we're taking about is just output on a larger macro scale, then yes, hiring enough people will replace 10x engineers. But some things i think you won't be able to replace -- You won't be able to replace speed on short-term projects. Lots of people means lots of communication overhead, which really kills fast responsive speed. If you value time to answer, you'd prefer a small team of really smart people instead of…

There is a flip side to that as well I think. One 10x developer can be more productive than 10 developers, but often 10 10x developers cannot be as productive as 100 developers. Certain things just don't "scale out" with the sort of creative advantages that highly productive engineers use.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#150

Post by goto11 »

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…

I'm sure Elm is a great language, but thinking it eliminates runtime errors is ridiculous. Of course it might eliminate exceptions, but exceptions are not errors, rather they are (sometimes) signals than an error have happened.
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