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10x (engineer, context) pairs

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Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#91

Post by glimshe »

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…

Some people are just smarter than others - much smarter. These engineers have their brains wired differently, helping them be more suited to programming/design work. If we accept the existence of 10x chess players (state champions) and 1000x chess players (grandmasters), why not 10x engineers?

I personally worked with (and managed) amazing engineers that are AT LEAST 10x more productive than the worst AND average engineers.

Assuming that they are toxic or hard to work with is something people say to feel "the same when all is taken into account". That's not the case, a lot of these great engineers are great people too making them objectively a lot better than the average engineer.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#92

Post by ravi-delia »

tjs8rj wrote: post #74

I have no idea why this is so contentious in the engineering discipline like it’s some unique question. When you were in school, weren’t their students just far more capable than others? When you look at sports, aren’t there just players far more capable than everyone else (any pro player vs any non pro)? When you look at art, aren’t there just artists so much better than others (professional artists vs a hobbyist)?…

Yeah I'm happy with my little toys and I've hacked some cool things together quickly, but I've known people who could really do 10x the work just because it was that easy for them. They knew what the problem was immediately and how to fix it well. Working on their code was (and, lucky me, is) a dream.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#93

Post by jollybean »

deltaonezero wrote: post #83
jollybean wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 'y…

Domain knowledge definitely is a factor. I guess you can call the people with domain knowledge 10x engineers, but there is a different class of engineers who have raw intelligence that make them a class well above those with only domain knowledge.

I don't even mean domain knowledge so much as an intimacy with the stack, the tools ... and not even so much 'knowledge' but 'know-how'.

I work with a company that sells IP in the form of patents, but it's only 1/2 the value. You have to know how to use the components, and the resulting data and finesse it.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#94

Post by Thiez »

dragonwriter wrote: post #90
Thiez wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention sports. I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.

> I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Aggregate productivity metrics are...difficult. But if one assumes that salaries are roughly proportional to value produced, it's not uncommon to have >10:1 ratio in the top professional tier of a sport, much less the whole of a professional sport. E.g., the NFL has about a 25:1 ratio https://www.comparably.com/salarie…

For the 10x programmer thing, the premise (as I understand it) is that the programmer can produce a working program in 1/10th of the time of a (terrible/average, the exact definition varies) programmer. So literally 10 times as fast.

I think a reasonable sports comparison for the 10x dev must be a sport where people can perform/compete individually, such as athletics, weightlifting, diving, etc. Otherwise you get into handwavey arguments about contributed value. As for wages, having the best players can be worth 10x or 25x compared to having average players. This may be true even if the best players are "only" 2x as good as the worst ones. So I don't think the wages mean much.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#95

Post by deltaonefour »

jollybean wrote: post #93
deltaonezero wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Domain knowledge definitely is a factor. I guess you can call the people with domain knowledge 10x engineers, but there is a different class of engineers who have raw intelligence that make them a class well above those with only domain knowledge.

I don't even mean domain knowledge so much as an intimacy with the stack, the tools ... and not even so much 'knowledge' but 'know-how'. I work with a company that sells IP in the form of patents, but it's only 1/2 the value. You have to know how to use the components, and the resulting data and finesse it.

That's what domain knowledge is. 'Know how.'

The engineers who are a class above the ones who rely on 'domain knowledge' aren't limited by the stack or the tools. They can switch to a different stack and the tools aren't so important to them.

For example I move faster on servers with ssh and tmux. I can do multiple things and configure stuff and test things really quickly with these tools.

A 10x engineer doesn't have patience learning about tmux and he doesn't need it.

In fact if you ever actually seen one of these guys (and they are rare) they actually tend to move slower with tooling. They just use the default terminal app on the Mac, they don't download iterm, tmux, neovim, vimplug or zsh to take their tooling to the next level.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#96

Post by temp8964 »

Thiez wrote: post #88
temp8964 wrote: post #6

There’s 10x in almost every profession, why is engineering different? If you take physicists with Ph.D. plus 3 years of post-doc as the baseline, of course top physicists are 10x the baseline. And don't interpret the 10x in a superficial silly way which makes post-docs stronger than Einstein. This goes the same in sports, arts, academics, etc. As long as the field has enough depth for growth, the top players can easi…

You mention sports. I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.

Did I say don’t interpret 10x in a superficial silly way? A runner can be 10x better than another runner, but 10x better is not 10x faster.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#97

Post by Thiez »

temp8964 wrote: post #96
Thiez wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention sports. I don't think most sports have a 10x difference between the worst and best professional athletes. Being 10 times faster or 10 times stronger is beyond human limits.

Did I say don’t interpret 10x in a superficial silly way? A runner can be 10x better than another runner, but 10x better is not 10x faster.

When is a runner 10 times better, then? For comparison, the mythical 10x developer can literally do tasks in 1/10th of the time.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#98

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#99

Post by deltaonefour »

khazhoux wrote: post #47
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…

> 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. Th…

Wait till you meet someone who is creative. These people are even rarer, and their solutions to problems tend to be like holy shit how can someone even think in that direction??

The one I knew actually had hugely novel solutions but was forgetful and absent minded.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#100

Post by arcanus »

jollybean wrote: post #50
arcanus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resu…

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

Disagree. My experience is that 10x engineers ARE inherently contextual. When we are talking about the cream of the crop, this requires evaluating impact.

You need the opportunity to thrive, which can be deeply contextual. Luck is an element of life. Napoleon would have been nothing without the French revolution. Einstein was fortunate (but capitalized!) that no one had put together Minkowski distance with open questions from michelson-morley.

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

A brain surgeon can publish the results of a cutting edge surgery, which can save many more lives that a single hand wielding a scalpel. I don't think anyone here is arguing that surgeon's are evaluated on scalpel technique any more than we are comparing programmers by SLOC/day.

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