351–356 of 356 posts
If anything the problem is usually understated, as a big problem in larger teams become people who actually add negative net productivity to a team. Also, not to be forgotten (and also covered in books like Waltzing with bears) are people who act as multipliers to the whole team by making the team “gel”.
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10x (or more) engineers in both hardware and SW exist. I've personally known more than a few, they are humbling, and I was pretty good myself at the time. SW is too time consuming, I think, for it to really show, and tools help even things out, but I think math shows that even 100x people exist - the von Neumanns of the world. Maybe they don't exist any more, but we had a bunch of them in the 1900s and it's inarguabl…
What do the two guys produce that's hard to analyze?
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You're looking at a very different kind of Nx engineer. The kind I'm talking about is where they approach a brand new problem that no one has an idea how to decompose using any tech that they have a clue how to operate, then a concise solution somehow appears using mostly what is already in service with careful splitting of tasks that appear clear and obvious only in retrospect. It's not about volume of output, preci…
The original studies that gave us the concept of a 10x engineer tracked defect rate and speed on programming tasks. You're using your own definition of an Nx engineer that: - does not relate to speed or defect rate - does not provide any way to quantify what N is - does not explain how an Nx engineer differs from a normal competent engineer There's no problem with saying "engineers who can solve novel open-ended prob…
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In my experience the difference between good consultancies and average product companies is not very big. On average I've seen consultancies being able to attract more technically curious and product-minded engineers. The exception are the product companies that are somehow special in the market (e.g. can offer a significantly better pay, or do something very interesting in terms of scale or technologies). The dynami…
Interesting on that first point, that's not what i would have expected. So what are you seeing from these product-minded engineers that leads them to choose a consultancy over a product company? For "underdog" consultancies, i've always felt that they win by 1) sending their A team where an incumbent would be sending in their C team. That would make sense, as the incumbent's A team is on a more important client, wher…
As for product-minded engineers, there is often more freedom at a smaller a consultancy than in (many) product companies. You can switch projects every 3-18 months, select a new technology you want to learn, have big ownership on the helping the customer building the product, etc. To some people this is ofc a downside and a lot depends on the kind of client/project you're working in. Much of this also is lost, when the consultancy starts taking on bigger projects with bigger clients that already have much of these things set in stone.
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The original studies that gave us the concept of a 10x engineer tracked defect rate and speed on programming tasks. You're using your own definition of an Nx engineer that: - does not relate to speed or defect rate - does not provide any way to quantify what N is - does not explain how an Nx engineer differs from a normal competent engineer There's no problem with saying "engineers who can solve novel open-ended prob…
The difference isn't only in how fast/well tasks get done, but a very good engineer will make many such tasks unnecessary altogether with better design and implementations that forego their need. Without including this aspect, the metric is a low-level one and not indicative of overall impact.
Framing it as though you have a rigorous comparison between them will mislead you into thinking about engineers as if they were fungible, like diesel generators, which is a very silly way to think about a divide-and-conquer field like software engineering where engineers develop different levels of expertise in different things.
If you're suggesting there is some underlying factor, like generalised intelligence, I'm not arguing with that! I strongly disagree that factor has anything to do with the number 10, or that engineers fall into discrete 1x and 10x camps, though. I think the phrase "10x engineer" leads to logical fallacies about performance.