51–60 of 81 posts
Because that is a myth. If that existed, you could build an entire startup with a single developer.
In a company I've worked for, the "bests" were given the projects with mostly clean slates, and were rewarded for coding quickly, meanwhile the other developers struggled to integrate everything together and refactors were often frowned upon "to not waste time on the delivery of the project". And of course only "the bests" were authorized to work on those new clean slates projects. This gave rise to a very nasty posi…
People are overcomplicating this. It's simply because there is no market to create price discovery. Most of your price is established the day you start, well before you've proven yourself to be a '50x engineer'. And no one outside the org knows you're a '50x engineer', so there's no competition trying to hire you away. I am surprised the author of this article missed this despite making the analogy to sports athletes…
I agree with a lot of what you said but this part isn't true. I've been in conversations where people were bragging up that they were able to hire away Person X after >2 years of convincing. It definitely felt like know a guy who knows a guy though, not some open market.
1) Sometimes they do. 2) Sometimes 10x or 50x or whatever Nx is not really what it's thought to be. I've had to deal with the aftermath of some "10x" engineers and it's not always pretty. Now you can say that this just means we aren't measuring properly, and the person wasn't really 10x (more like -100x in fact, that minus before the 100, in case you missed it, is for "negative" as in negative 100x) but there are sti…
The right circumstance + the right person can make someone 50x. It appears to me the ability to identify circumstances and people and put them in the right place is also very important? It might be another 50x worth thing.
> “In software, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; Maybe even 100:1.” Steve Jobs > If you’re a software engineer, you would probably agree with what Steve Jobs said. I am and I don't. I've yet to see even a 10x engineer. I've seen people who are more than 10x within a very narrow domain , but when you include the whole system and all their responsibilities, no one comes close…
You probably don't sit with them in the lunchroom, but folks like Steve Jobs might.
There's another reason, too -- which is that a "50x engineer" will very rarely be 50x on most development tasks. Your 50x engineer may be able to build a highly performant and complex algorithm by themselves, truly in a week where other engineers might take a year. But 99% of programming isn't that. It's CRUD apps and configuration files and debugging browser quirks and hunting down race conditions etc. Your "50x eng…
More engineers than you think are making a million or two, it’s just not really talked about.
Interesting. I would be curious about if it's the engineering ability that makes them get such high salaries or it’s something else.
BTDT but I don't pretend it's my magnificent skills (although I'm good), it's just the luck of the draw with stock compensation. I'm just as good in other jobs where the stock performance has been lackluster.
> “In software, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; Maybe even 100:1.” Steve Jobs > If you’re a software engineer, you would probably agree with what Steve Jobs said. I am and I don't. I've yet to see even a 10x engineer. I've seen people who are more than 10x within a very narrow domain , but when you include the whole system and all their responsibilities, no one comes close…
Come on, there are some people who are brilliant and effective. I have known a handful of these folks, which probably matches the statistics. You probably don't sit with them in the lunchroom, but folks like Steve Jobs might.
Sure, but can I replace 50 average engineers with one of them, and get the same output?
Never.