Surely it depends a lot on the project. When I wrote the system myself then I was a 10x developer. Now I am working on someone else's code i am not.
> When I wrote the system myself then I was a 10x developer. Where you 10x more productive than other developers writing systems themselves?
No that's the point. I currently work on a system that is written by someone else. He fixes bugs a lot quicker than me, as he has a lot clearer mental model. I need to reverse engineer ideas from code a lot of the time.
I'm glad this appears to give you some satisfaction, but I hope I never have to work with you, or around you, or on any project you've worked on.
What is wrong with ignoring and working around toxic people who only undermines the project?
Ignoring sounds passive but there is nothing passive about telling people their ideas and cooperation is unproductive (be it people from product, RnD, management, QA etc), you spend much time and energy convincing them their ideas are not concrete, or are going in a bad direction, or are simply bad..
Having the burden of completing the project (successfully!) on me, I have to cut through the BS and provide results, not attend to egos and fragility of everyone involved..
Never the less, I try to be dry and not personal as I can to communicate the situation as simple as possible to the other party..
In my consulting career I learned that being "nice" is not worth it and ends up costing me in mental health..
Right. But you can't build a functioning team that works together and can rely on each other by fostering a culture of competition and hiring only the "predestined" 10x engineers. If the team culture is to help each other, forgive mistakes and learn from each other without measuring who's the best the team will automatically build itself without the need to hire only "10x engineers". Or so I suppose. I'm not an HR pe…
Where I’ve seen teams with high concentrations of unusually smart people, they gelled and collaborated at least as well as anyone else. In fact the bandwidth and fidelity of their idea transfers is part of what made them impressive. It’s like they had their own little language to describe the codebase and what to do with it. These were mature and soft-spoken people; might be different with brash young hotshots.
To me that sounds like an environment where there's not a lot of competition involved. (Which is what I was describing.)
Where I’ve seen teams with high concentrations of unusually smart people, they gelled and collaborated at least as well as anyone else. In fact the bandwidth and fidelity of their idea transfers is part of what made them impressive. It’s like they had their own little language to describe the codebase and what to do with it. These were mature and soft-spoken people; might be different with brash young hotshots.
To me that sounds like an environment where there's not a lot of competition involved. (Which is what I was describing.)
They were far and away the most selective team in the company.
I’ve seen this before in university too; competitive to get into can still be cooperative once in.
As a 10x programmer myself (NOT TO BRAG) I will tell you we definitely exist. My greatest annoyance is watching the rest of you peons crawl along at a snails pace while I am inventing the next groundbreaking technology that will completely flip your existence upside down. Perhaps the only person who could even understand my level of motivation is Elon Musk, but I'm not even sure if I would have the patience to explai…
To me that sounds like an environment where there's not a lot of competition involved. (Which is what I was describing.)
They were far and away the most selective team in the company. I’ve seen this before in university too; competitive to get into can still be cooperative once in.
HN thread limit might cut this off but what if someone in that team starts experiencing problems and self-doubt? If everything in the team has always worked smoothly before they might not be able to handle it.
Additionally, elitist teams might scare off some people that could otherwise be great engineers if they just got a little entry help. Sure they can "get that elsewhere" but if every team behaved like that there's not only nowhere to enter, but there's also sort of an omnipresent assumption that you have to be good from the start in order to be able to achieve something in engineering.
I'm not saying your described team doesn't work but it's not exactly the kind of culture HR should be striving for in my opinion. (Albeit it's still far better than than a team that doesn't work at all or works against each other.)