It seems to go like this. A lot of programmers are weird. They don’t get along well with people. They keep weird hours. They dislike social norms. This part is true, although far from universal. The problem is the next step: since programmerness is associated with all this weird behavior, the most extreme and therefore best programmers will be the ones who behave the weirdest.
This is reinforced by a simple selective process: mediocre programmers who behave badly tend to get fired, while genius ones are often kept around because their abilities outweigh their flaws (or at least management thins they do). Thus, when you see a really weird programmer on the job, chances are that they’re also really good.
It’s all bullshit as far as I can tell. Plenty of great programmers have fine social skills, work 9-5, enjoy teaching new people, etc. Plenty of crappy programmers are also weirdos. But the perception is definitely there.
This discussion of 10x programmers and sometimes denial that they exist is really people pushing back against the notion that weird or bad behavior is a signal of greatness, or that productivity means you can treat people like shit.
Exactly. No one sensible disputes that, given the right circumstances, some engineers (or business leaders, etc.) can bring more value to an organization or culture broadly than ten or more people who are just OK.
But pretty much everyone I know who I consider exceptionally valuable is also good at working with others and enabling teams to be successful.
https://twitter.com/skirani/status/1150019060467240960?s=20
"I am surprised by extreme views on 10x engineers. They are great individual contributors. They may not be good with teamwork. So what? They can be phenomenal in the early stage of the product cycle.
Find the best in each & get the best out of them. That's what good managers do."
The overall picture is of someone who is technically competent but "moves fast and breaks things". The person who coined that phrase perfectly embodies the upsides and downsides of this type of person: Zuckerberg quickly threw together a PHP app, is a gigantic jerk, and he is a billionaire because his product was phenomenally successful. Then other, kinder, gentler and more team-oriented people came later to make the product performant and legible. If the team-oriented people had been involved from the beginning you would have gotten Google Plus.
It stands to reason that such a person would be more likely, on balance, to be abrasive and dislike meetings. I guess the only problem I see with his formulation is that a "10x" engineer is implied to be better than other engineers. Atwood's "you need all kinds" formulation is better.
That’s what all this pushback over “10x engineers” is about. It’s not pushback against the notion that some people are really good at what they do. It’s against the notion that those people are necessarily asshole loners.
It’s a common broken syllogism that goes like, Zuck built Facebook into an empire with his bare hands, Zuck is an asshole, therefore Zuck was successful because he’s an asshole, therefore if we want to succeed we need to hire an asshole.
Alternately: our guy is an asshole but that’s ok because that’s what you get with a 10x engineer. We need that 10x so we need an asshole and therefore if you want them to stop being an asshole then you want this company to fail.
Alternately: there’s no excuse for being a jerk and people are tired of it being justified on the basis that it’s a necessary component of being great.
In my experience there is little correlation between programmer productivity as an individual and things like kindness and ability to work in a team. Plenty of geniuses are friendly people who work great with others. If you hire one of those for your early stage startup, you’ll not only do fine, but you’ll be in a much better position once you reach a point where you need a team.
A distinction should be drawn between a "good programmer" and "person good at startups and greenfield projects". I would maintain that the latter requires a certain amount of assholery.
Really good products are not made by committee, at least not in the beginning stages. Committees and large groups of people also tend to slow things down, a lot. You have to be willing to be opinionated and self-assured to maintain a cohesive vision of where you want to go, and that necessarily means pissing people off. Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, and possibly Elon Musk are other examples.
So while 10xers in terms of pure programming skill will not be enriched in assholes, the famous ones will generally be, because they got in on the ground floor. The ground floor is where it helps to be an asshole. Most of us here are not dealing with such situations though, so I would agree to the extent that for 99% of employers in 99% of situations, considering assholery to be a positive trait is very unwise.
You mention Steve Jobs. What about Woz? Without Woz, Apple never would have gotten off the ground. I suspect most of us would agree that Woz is not only a 10x engineer, but probably a 100x. At least, he was in the early days of Apple, before the plane crash. And he’s a super nice fellow.
One thing being an asshole helps with is becoming famous. Everybody knows who Steve Jobs was. Approximately nobody outside the tech community knows about Woz. So naturally, if you go looking for examples, you’ll find lots of assholes. That doesn’t mean assholery correlates with (let alone causes) success.
in which a VC once again proves that what passes for "wisdom" in Silicon Valley is often indistinguishable from what others would assume was satire.