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10x (engineer, context) pairs

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Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#41

Post by fnbr »

angarg12 wrote: post #29

I'm not quite sold on the first bullet point that if the impact of your company/project is 10x, then you are a 10x engineer. Here is my case. In my previous (small) company we achieved a yearly revenue of ~1M eur. I was super proud that I directly contributed 10% of that revenue. My current team in Big Tech generates millions of revenue per month. I could do a small improvement in a week and generate more than 100k i…

you’re not making the right comparison. The right comparison would be within the same org. Is there someone on your team that generates $1M per week? Then they’re 10x you. Or does everyone else generate $10k per week? Then you’re 10x them.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#42

Post by mathgladiator »

Comparison is the thief of joy.

The notion of context is exceptionally important because it relates to Price's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_J._de_Solla_Price ). You see this in big tech like crazy where most engineers are trying to get a few things done in a massive code base, and then many decisions come from on-high via principal engineers. As a former senior principal engineer, I've been there, seen it, and enjoyed it.

The question that haunted me was how to help more people grow into higher roles, and the problem is a lack of scope. This lack of scope is oppressive as there are only so many creative needs and the volume of toil is hard to avoid.

So, yes, if you have the right context, then you can do great.

However, we also can't dismiss intelligence, memory, or experience as multipliers. The unfortunate fact is that these are not uniformly shared, so there are a bunch of people talking over each other.

Worst yet, we don't have a common way of thinking about experience, and here Price's Law reveals an ugly truth: deep experience is rare.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#43

Post by deltaonefour »

convolvatron wrote: post #14
deltaonefour wrote: post #8

They must exist. If IQ can range from 80 to 200 and IQ correlates with programming ability then of course there are engineers out there at the far end of the spectrum.

this is a pretty weak statement. even given such a correlation, what is the scale? how sensitive does programming skill need to be related to IQ to make a 10x engineer sufficiently probable given the population. the real problem though is that IQ and 'programming ability' aren't really well defined.

IQ is well defined. Programming ability is not.

A sign of low IQ is requiring everything to be well defined and scientifically validated in order to move forward in analyzing a problem. Science is slow and has huge limitations. Formally defining complex concepts like "what is life" is also incredibly tedious and so complex that it's often nearly impossible. Do you want to formally define "programming ability" before ever making a statement that intelligence is highly correlated with intelligence? Are we really stuck in some limbo of being unable to come to a fuzzy conclusion on such a simple concept because we can't formally define something?

Look at the world around you. What does your gut tell you? Do you really need a scientific study to tell you that walking into a wall is unhealthy? Do you really need a scientific study to tell you intelligence correlates with programming ability? The former is obvious, the latter is also obvious... but not to stupid people.

You're absolutely not stupid, but sometimes people end up limiting themselves by trying too hard to be more intelligent.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#45

Post by arcanus »

deltaonefour wrote: post #23
throwaway0asd wrote: post #3

I have found the one distinction of 10x engineers is originality. They can write an original solution to a problem and be done. They don’t need a 1000 different tools to do their job for them, which has second and third order consequences. That also means not having a petrified terror of failure. Yes, there are 10x developers and this is measurable. It’s a progression of the Pareto Distribution. People scared shitles…

I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The…

Von Neumann and Einstein's contributions to humanity are incomparable to a 10x engineer. I don't think metrics such as productivity (which 10x crudely approximates) can begin to address this level of innovation. Both unquestionably drove paradigm shifts in scientific and mathematical thinking.

It's not measuring the same thing. A 10x engineer might be compared to a full tenured professor with a high citation count. Einstein and Neumann are luminaries of human thought.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#46

Post by stingraycharles »

dilyevsky wrote: post #38
lostdog wrote: post #4

Yeah, there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment. But I have worked with a few people who were clear 10x engineers. Everything they worked on they did better and faster and cleaner. They could often solve problems that other skilled people couldn't even get started on. Yes, they usually picked important and impactful things to wo…

> there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment. Isn’t that just really obvious truism that someone who is hyper specialized and really good in one area say video codecs is probably not a 10x’er in frontend dev? Doesn’t make it fake, still a jackpot as far as employers and probably coworkers are concerned. Unless you’re someone like…

I think what the parent meant was that “true” 10x engineers can apply their skills to a wide variety of problems, and it isn’t just applicable to a narrow problem domain and/or for a very short period. This makes clear he isn’t talking someone who just happens to be specialized in a specific codebase or one specific problem, for example.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#47

Post by khazhoux »

deltaonefour wrote: post #23
throwaway0asd wrote: post #3

I have found the one distinction of 10x engineers is originality. They can write an original solution to a problem and be done. They don’t need a 1000 different tools to do their job for them, which has second and third order consequences. That also means not having a petrified terror of failure. Yes, there are 10x developers and this is measurable. It’s a progression of the Pareto Distribution. People scared shitles…

I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The…

> I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The solution is efficient and lacks unnecessary elements but it is not a novel solution.

I love this description and it matches my experience. Most people will both lose time with false-start approaches that are scrapped, and then with a sometimes endless series of commits at the end to patch up problems. The top engineers I've worked with (1-2 a decade) somehow just manage to avoid all that lost time.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#48

Post by tehchromic »

lostdog wrote: post #4

Yeah, there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment. But I have worked with a few people who were clear 10x engineers. Everything they worked on they did better and faster and cleaner. They could often solve problems that other skilled people couldn't even get started on. Yes, they usually picked important and impactful things to wo…

With respect, I think you missed the point of the article! It's that we are all 10x engineers in the right context, even if that's providing the context for someone else to be 10x, which of sounds like you are 10x at!

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#49

Post by jollybean »

deltaonefour wrote: post #23
throwaway0asd wrote: post #3

I have found the one distinction of 10x engineers is originality. They can write an original solution to a problem and be done. They don’t need a 1000 different tools to do their job for them, which has second and third order consequences. That also means not having a petrified terror of failure. Yes, there are 10x developers and this is measurable. It’s a progression of the Pareto Distribution. People scared shitles…

I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The…

Are you sure it's intelligence?

The great engineers I know have done it all before. They've worked on similar problems. They're not really breaking new territory.

I think this is where being 'prolific' matters.

Beethoven was a genius, but it makes no difference that he was smart if he didn't spend years and years just 'writing' music, transposing, experimenting etc..

That's the advice big composers give today i.e. 'you have to move quickly'.

If you were to watch someone build something, relatively quickly, you might be just amazed. But there is a lot of practice and trade-craft / craftmanship going on.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#50

Post by jollybean »

arcanus wrote: post #45
deltaonefour wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The…

Von Neumann and Einstein's contributions to humanity are incomparable to a 10x engineer. I don't think metrics such as productivity (which 10x crudely approximates) can begin to address this level of innovation. Both unquestionably drove paradigm shifts in scientific and mathematical thinking. It's not measuring the same thing. A 10x engineer might be compared to a full tenured professor with a high citation count. E…

That's not the best way to describe it.

A 'Medical Researcher' can be less intelligent than a surgeon, but impact billions of lives.

A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time.

I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual.

A lot of crap startups, might have 10x engineers, but it may make no difference. Or 10x-ers caught up in Corporate Bureaucracy, same result.

So this whole mapping 'some project to revenues' really is something else, quite different. Maybe useful, but not in the context we are thinking here.

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