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Loved this.
Way back when I first saw the 10x engineer proclamations I actually thought they were … a joke. Like a meme or something. They described a lot of anti social and strait up toxic behavior and seemed to glorify it. It was absurd. It seemed like the kind of behavior that would all but ensure someone thinks they’re so much more productive than everyone else, and would prevent them from ever seeing that they aren’t. I was…
We have a small team (8 devs) and we've focused a ton of energy on developer experience and ergonomics to reduce the cost of contribution and code reviews, and facilitate interaction with other stakeholders. I'm confident at this point that we've doubled productivity, which would make our "Head of" a 10x engineer :)
Since we’re putting numbers on things, how did we go from 2x to 10x?
> Synthesis is essence of software engineering, whereas abstraction is the essence of computer science. Your job as a software developer will be to synthesise something new from composable pieces. What you create should be simple to understand and extend. Loved this.
Has anyone published some kind of quantified, "hard" comparison/survey about the relative productivity of programmers? It would be very interesting with a clean "we asked n programmers to solve this"-type problem, and then being able to compare the solutions. Uh, did I just sound like I wanted to work in recruiting? #fail
> It would be very interesting with a clean "we asked n programmers to solve this"-type problem [...]
It's been done, right? There's all those whiteboard interviews that highly resourced orgs study endlessly. There's a whole industry around preparing for these things. What do we have to show for it as an industry? Not much. If the stories are to be believed, folks are still flunking "fizz-buzz" at alarming rates.
My principles for a 1x programmer:
* Work is a means to an end. A job should support the lifestyle you want to achieve, not be an end on itself.
* 9-to-5 is a perfectly reasonable schedule. Fiercely protects personal and time off.
* Prefers to spend time with their family or hobbies (e.g. train for that marathon) rather than working on a side project in Github.
* Strives to do a "good enough" job rather than absolute excellence.
* Keeps their skills at a reasonable level to do the job, but doesn't necessarily work on continuously improving.
* Most companies don't really need 10x engineers, and would do just fine with 1x ones.
Some people might cringe at this list. Some will argue that one could never be a good developer following those principles. I'm ok with that. I think we should acknowledge for many people programming is just a paycheck and they don't share the passion of the HN crowd. We should broaden our horizon of what success looks like in the development job. Me, for one, feel like some of my friends that fit the description are winning at life more than I do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have a small team (8 devs) and we've focused a ton of energy on developer experience and ergonomics to reduce the cost of contribution and code reviews, and facilitate interaction with other stakeholders. I'm confident at this point that we've doubled productivity, which would make our "Head of" a 10x engineer :)
> Doubled productivity… 10x… Since we’re putting numbers on things, how did we go from 2x to 10x?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have a small team (8 devs) and we've focused a ton of energy on developer experience and ergonomics to reduce the cost of contribution and code reviews, and facilitate interaction with other stakeholders. I'm confident at this point that we've doubled productivity, which would make our "Head of" a 10x engineer :)
> Doubled productivity… 10x… Since we’re putting numbers on things, how did we go from 2x to 10x?
Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1.
Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer.
Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the other half by more than 2:1.
The best people outperform the average by 10x.
I think this is one of those things where its a question of what you're optimizing for. I don't like boxing solutions into `10x` or `1x` or whatever. I think this misses the entire point. It also assumes that single software engineers can make or break a project or company, and this is rarely the real case, even if it feels like it is. I think an often missed piece in the formula is systematic incentives. At a compan…
Foresight, support and tutoring are three ways I can think of that would generate a "10x". Foresight in making better decisions which won't boggle down development later down the line. Support in the form of automating busy work, developing tools, removing impediments and making people more eager to develop (notice how some of these are not dependent on developers). Tutoring through making other people more efficient and raising new ICs.
All three of these are highly dependent on circumstances set by management. You're not getting the time to automate if management continuously pushes you to fix issues and work on the next non-workflow-related issue. You're not getting a lot of time to think about the best solution if the first working prototype is what's expanded on despite there being obvious flaws requiring exploration. No quality teaching if individuals aren't given time to prepare teaching materials and others aren't given time to listen. The list goes on.
In all likelihood you'll still need someone eager enough to go grab the knowledge and then distribute it in some form (how else are things going to change?), but it takes away the need to fill every position with a whizkid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have a small team (8 devs) and we've focused a ton of energy on developer experience and ergonomics to reduce the cost of contribution and code reviews, and facilitate interaction with other stakeholders. I'm confident at this point that we've doubled productivity, which would make our "Head of" a 10x engineer :)
> Doubled productivity… 10x… Since we’re putting numbers on things, how did we go from 2x to 10x?
Napkin pseudo math for sure.. but when has that even stopped us from categorizing engineers with these labels.