A 10x engineer is not an engineer who works 10x as hard or fast, but someone who knows what to focus on and as result comes up with more elegant solutions.
10x Engineer
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Re: 10x Engineer
#72I 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…
My mother thinks I'm 10X handsome.
If you're accusing me of bias, my vanity would quite have preferred a different outcome :)
Re: 10x Engineer
#73Even if the 10x engineer were to exist, assuming a normal distribution, they would be extremely rare and highly sought after. To optimise your business around hiring such a precious unicorn would seem like a very foolhardy strategy. For one, simple probability suggests that you probably won't find one. And if you were to find one, could you be certain that it were a real unicorn rather than a horse with a plastic con…
YES. What the 10X myth hurt most is probably hiring practices.
If you're not a 10x and assuming one exists, do you really have the expertise to tell that he is 10x?
Re: 10x Engineer
#74Of all the engineers you've worked with, if you can think of eleven such that you'd rather hire one rather than the other ten, then that person is a 10x engineer.
Re: 10x Engineer
#75I thing part of the mythology about the 10x engineer stems from the very real and shockingly widespread existence of the NNPP or the "Net Negative Producing Programmer". There are many environments in which NNPP's are pretty much the standard, programmers that produce more problems and bugs than actual working and sustainable solutions. In such an environment any competent developer will quickly stand out and will ea…
This hits close to home currently working as an enterprise web dev.
Re: 10x Engineer
#76Does this even need scientific validation? There seem to be people who can't code at all, so if you can code, compared to them you are an infinity times engineer.
Re: 10x Engineer
#77I thing part of the mythology about the 10x engineer stems from the very real and shockingly widespread existence of the NNPP or the "Net Negative Producing Programmer". There are many environments in which NNPP's are pretty much the standard, programmers that produce more problems and bugs than actual working and sustainable solutions. In such an environment any competent developer will quickly stand out and will ea…
I like the way Mike Church put it in a Quora answer (http://qr.ae/NHgRJ): employees are either multipliers, adders (most common), subtracters, or dividers (fire immediately). Whether multipliers are 5x or 10x more productive is a matter of nebulous metrics, but there are obvious standouts whose presence brings a very nonlinear increase in value to the team.
Re: 10x Engineer
#78While 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 feel obliged to toss in Joel's commentary... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html
His commentary about "hitting the high notes" was new to me. It isn't just that 10x people are faster and make less mistakes, they also can do things that others can't.
This doesn't mean that you have to ignore culture, and tolerate bad behavior. But it does mean that in software it is worth the effort and cost to chase and properly manage the best talent.
Re: 10x Engineer
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
YES. What the 10X myth hurt most is probably hiring practices.
The thing that always got me is that even if they do exist, the candidate selection methods are, at best, a very unreliable way to identify them. Still, it really fed into the "only hire the absolute best" mythos that has spread in countless other harmful ways. Consider the aphorism "A players hire A players, B players hire C players". The general message of all of it has always been: "You must hire the very best, ev…
Yes, "only hire the best" hurts everyone.
What they should have been doing is hiring more and firing more. At least you'd have a better idea of how well a person does in the context of your environment.
Re: 10x Engineer
#80The 10x is a huge simplification, but it doesn't make it any less true. Obviously there's a huge range. I'd go so far as to say there are 100x engineers -- but it's not that they personally achieve 100x more than another programmer sitting in front of the computer. It's that they have the vision and talent to set a project up the right way from the start, so that the normal programmers can be productive. They're the…
Even the 100x is a simplification, of course.
One example (out of an infinite set of them) would be if you need a software system that deals with massive amounts of signal processing on a power constrained real-time DSP chip. There are lots of people out there who are "Senior Software Engineers" at whatever company they work at currently (because they can create website solutions by stacking existing JavaScript frameworks with some glue code) who may never be capable of delivering that system to you. Not 10x later than someone who can, not 100x later than someone who can, not 1000x later than someone who can, but not within their lifetime and thus certainly not within a useful time-frame for your project.
And I don't mean to pick on web developers here, that's just used for example. There are plenty of people out there doing web development who could adapt to embedded system programming, or who already do both adeptly, but there are also plenty of "web programmers" who are really actually designers or glorified project management people with little to no aptitude for programming at all.
Also, I don't think this is unique to programmers. I wouldn't expect a general practitioner doctor to be able to perform neurosurgery and just have him take 10x longer to do it, he may just never have the "hands" for it.