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10x Engineer

medium.com

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Re: 10x Engineer

#51

Post by debacle »

People who don't believe in 10x programmers don't understand that they themselves are probably 3x or 4x programmers, thus to them a 10x programmer is probably only a 2.5x or 3x programmer relatively speaking.

There are a lot of 1x programmers out there. So many that it's very easy to be an "above average" programmer.

I am not a 10x programmer, but I'm not a 1x programmer either. I've met people who are 6-10x programmers, and they are incredibly good at what they do, to an extent that's hard to describe. I think it requires an even balance of skill, pragmatism, experience, and passion that allows someone to have that kind of performance.

Re: 10x Engineer

#52

Post by falcolas »

gruseom wrote: post #11

I spent Saturday digging out a basement with my son. The kid was a machine—for sure he did an order of magnitude more than I did. There's your 10x right there. If you can see it with picks, shovels, and a wheelbarrow, it's hardly implausible that you would see it in software. The research literature on programming productivity sucks, but not because 10x is a myth. It sucks because we have no reliable way of measuring…

Age, physique, motivation and balancing work with rest had nothing to do with it?

I'm 10x more productive than my dad at physical labor, but a lot of that is because he's 75 and I'm less than half his age. Doesn't mean I'm any kind of physical labor "rockstar"...

Re: 10x Engineer

#53

Post by colanderman »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #24

While the article correctly highlights the lack of rigorous scientific studies on 10x engineers, it also generalizes a bit too much from anecdote to make the argument that they are mythical creatures. A more reasonable argument is that the hypothetical existence of 10x engineers explains little about the productivity of most organizations. Personally, in the couple decades I have been in this business working in coun…

I will add that none of the 10x engineers I worked with were burning the candle at both ends. They did not work particularly hard compared to everyone else, they were just extraordinarily effective and consistent at making excellent choices in an engineering context and always worked very well with most engineering teams they needed to work with. I've never seen any of these guys burn out, they've been doing it for decades.

I wonder if there's a bit of cause-and-effect swapping here. (i.e. perhaps many 10x engineers are that way because their sustainable work day allows them to have gained decades of experience)

Re: 10x Engineer

#55

Post by alguemoi »

tdees40 wrote: post #49

I think the free market mostly answers this question. According to indeed.com, the average software engineer salary is $91K. So obviously a company (assuming they could properly identify them) would pay $910K/year to a 10x programmer. Are there people out there making that for pure coding (i.e. not management)? Maybe, but it seems doubtful. I would think that generally 99.9999% of programmers make less than $400K if…

Following a Efficient Wage approach, productivity and wages don't grow linearly.

Re: 10x Engineer

#56

Post by debacle »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #8

One of the many problems with the 10x Engineer concept is that it imagines that skill is a single dimension, when in fact it depends massively on context, environment, and the specifics of individual experience and the problem at hand. I am definitely not a 10x anything, but my group once got handed a massive data-processing task that my supervisors--better coders than me, to be sure--believed was impossible to autom…

In those three days, you were a 10x engineer - you accomplished 200 man-hours of work in ~24ish hours.

'10x' is about measuring productivity, and nothing else. A 10x programmer when it comes to HTML form validation might be really amazing at what he does, however may still be worth less than a 1x database administrator.

Re: 10x Engineer

#57

Post by natmaster »

I think the main problem with this concept is that everyone fits into two categories.

As with any probability distribution of natural phenomena, there is a bell curve. There aren't a handle of 10x programmers and and bunch of 1x ones.

Even if the variance is much lower than people think, there would still be room for some number of 10x the productivity of some other person.

Re: 10x Engineer

#58

Post by gruseom »

falcolas wrote: post #52
gruseom wrote: post #11

I spent Saturday digging out a basement with my son. The kid was a machine—for sure he did an order of magnitude more than I did. There's your 10x right there. If you can see it with picks, shovels, and a wheelbarrow, it's hardly implausible that you would see it in software. The research literature on programming productivity sucks, but not because 10x is a myth. It sucks because we have no reliable way of measuring…

Age, physique, motivation and balancing work with rest had nothing to do with it? I'm 10x more productive than my dad at physical labor, but a lot of that is because he's 75 and I'm less than half his age. Doesn't mean I'm any kind of physical labor "rockstar"...

Of course those things have something to do with it! Who would ever say they didn't?

Re: 10x Engineer

#59

Post by alguemoi »

debacle wrote: post #51

People who don't believe in 10x programmers don't understand that they themselves are probably 3x or 4x programmers, thus to them a 10x programmer is probably only a 2.5x or 3x programmer relatively speaking. There are a lot of 1x programmers out there. So many that it's very easy to be an "above average" programmer. I am not a 10x programmer, but I'm not a 1x programmer either. I've met people who are 6-10x programm…

I think you don't know how to read.

Re: 10x Engineer

#60

Post by com2kid »

I have known developers who, given a moderately complex programming task, will complete it within a reasonable amount of time. The code will be correct with no more than the expected bugs, and the design will be OK as a stand alone piece of code.

The design will not be ingenious. It will not take other parts of the system into account. It will not have simple tweaks done in preparation of future design change requests, tweaks that would make the code no more complicated, but many times more flexible. The code will not be as eloquent or as simple as it could be. A slight alteration to the initial design would have greatly simplified the code and ensured against bugs.

Then there is the opposite side of things.

The programmer who understands the greater business needs of the product, and writes code in anticipation of what is to come. Not entirely abstract to the point of ridiculousness, but with proper hooks put in that will be needed later. A software engineer who thinks past the most obvious implementation to what sorts of implications different designs offer. A software engineer who creates eloquent and understandable systems.

Yes one can argue that proper procedure and design reviews can enable the OK developer to reach the level of the Software Engineer, but at what cost to overhead? 2x? 3x? How many meetings, how many discussions?

There is a huge productivity difference between even experienced developers. Denying that is purposeful blindness.

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