Busting the 10x software engineer myth

This is a silly comparison. The engineers I've worked with in my career that stand out don't stand out because they can write for-loops faster than others or public-class-Foo-public-static-void-main-string-args-System.out.println-hello faster than others. They are much more productive because they are better at ensuring they understand the problems they're trying to solve, and solving the problem with the least amount of superfluous work.

> No one talked about the fact that this particular developer had been developing the same system for the past 15 years, the first five almost alone. He relished being “the best." Wrote hard-to-understand procedural code to 5000-line files. Did not actively share knowledge with his peers. Over the years, some capable developers had joined the company. Most of them decided to move on. The ones left were happy to coast along and leave all the heroics to the “10x engineer.” As a result, the company had great difficulties in trying to scale its development efforts.

This example seems like a counter-example to me. It's important to separate out one's (potentially flawed) judgement vs the actual value an engineer brings. This engineer made everyone else less productive. Simply calling someone a "10x engineer" does not make it so.

> The best strategy for most companies is not a relentless focus on trying to hire “the best” in hopes of finding 10x unicorn engineers.

The rest of the article is a distraction from this generally good piece of advice. For many things, finding a competent programmer familiar with your tools and stack who can write the CRUD operations you need should be acceptable. A lot of software engineering interviewing distracts from this, with gotcha trivia questions about whether one can recite from memory algorithms from a text book that are not relevant to the work.

This is, at best, half true. The high performers might get the most attention from certain teachers (esp. in middle class and upper middle class schools), but systemically they are ignored.

1. The general idea in education circles is that the higher performers “will do fine” without any additional attention, so they don’t need much help. As such, very little research attention is focused on them.

2. Gifted education is a joke in the US. Almost completely ignored.

3. Most honors classes are also a joke in that they are often regular classes with more busy work.

4. AP classes are sometimes good, but it’s often easier just to take an actual college course if your school allows it. Same or less classroom time and much less busy work.

5. School administrators are evaluated based on performance metrics. In almost all cases it is more beneficial and often easier to improve the low performers than it is to improve the high performers. This is largely due to the metrics that have been chosen for evaluation.

As for Japan, that observation is very true. That said, most of the talent mismatches disappear starting at high school and sometimes junior high school due to tracking (of which I am a fan).