This article isn't about engineers that make your team better; it's about engineers that make your team worse.
10x engineers do exist, but they're vanishingly rare. I actually met one once. He eventually burnt out and left the industry permanently.
You've really never met this person? Feels like more or less everyone with real expertise should be able to do this in the right job.
The statement that every engineer can be a 10x engineer is recursively paradoxical. If a 10x engineer existed, in my mind, he would immediately be able to identify this logical error.
I won't waste any more words on someone who willfully misunderstands them.
Nope. I've never met anyone who can complete in a month what it takes an average coder a year to complete.
Neither have you.
i've built in two weeks something that took another guy 5 years to not even quite finish. with better performance, reliability and extensibility across the board.
that's a factor of 130x (or more!). how do you want to divide that up between the two of us? if he's 0.01x, how rare must he be for the "average" to still be sitting at 1x?
Remember, for every Bellard, Carmack or jart: there's at least 100,000 glue engineers who are just trying to cash in some easy VC checks - can't blame them at all.
The true 10x engineer looks at the project, sees the inherent needless complexity, goes back to the sponsor and uses his business knowledge to renegotiate the specs. Leading to a reduced scope with 98% of the business value and 10% of the work.
I think the reason so many people have doubts on the existence of 10x is that they might have never encountered one.
I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Useless to say they loved him and the next summer they tried to get him back, even offering a signing bonus for an internship (something they considered unheard of) but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. You can guess the comp was probably already 3x what his previous job was offering. Of course, he wouldn't return.
There's a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to most companies, even if they are in the same "local market" [0][1] (Some use the term "dark matter devs" but I know it has another meaning [2]). These guys tend to fly under the radar quite a bit. If you are in a tier 2 market or company, your chances of attracting one are close to nil. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally). When hiring is red hot, they might completely disappear from the hiring pool by junior year.
> Get this, say a project takes a year to complete. The concept is saying a 10x engineer can do this in about month. If such a person exists it will be so rare I estimate that most people haven't ever encountered an actual "10x" engineer. Even a 3x engineer is super rare. I can see something like 2x happening where a project that takes a year is done in 6 months. That is rare but plausible.
That's thinking in terms of bricklaying. 10x, like Carmack or Woz for example, bring completely new ideas and paradigm shifts. Think of the engineering happening at Xerox PARC for instance.
[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...
[1] http://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/
[2] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
All of that are arbitrary numbers. 10 is arbitrary and not actually measurable, but your 3, 4 are as well.
But I think you're on the right track with this thinking. "10x engineer" does not make things 10 times as fast as "1x" engineer does, they do qualitatively different things
Take an example of an engineer who sees through the bullshit of a "cloud architect" who specifies a complicated architecture with novel technologies to pad his resume. Cutting down on this can easily save the project / deliver much faster.
This is kind of an interesting view - 10x engineer does not make projects run 10x faster, but they prevent mistakes which would slow down the project by factor of 10.
If mean = 1x (by definition 1x should be the mean) and the std is the maximum possible value (also 1x). Then 10x would be 10 std past the norm.
This makes my numbers not arbitrary. 2x or 3x would only be 2 or 3 std past the norm. Which is reasonable (only if the std = 1x which is likely not the case and is most likely lower).
If a 10xer existed, That's like saying you found a human who runs 10x faster then the mean (10mph) or you found a human 10x taller than the mean (5'10"). 10 is arbitrary but 2 or 3 is less arbitrary. Ever heard of the company 3sigma? The name represents Rarest non arbitrary anomaly from the norm.
It is actually fundamentally illogical to think of human ability in terms of a multiple of the mean because no other measurable human quality follows that kind of distribution. Almost all of these measured things follow the normal distribution.
You are therefore highly highly unlikely to find a 10x engineer or a -10x engineer. This applies even to things like engineering leadership.
When viewed from this lens you can actually see that it's actually very unlikely for even the best leader to improve the productivity of every member of his team by even 2x. So I take that back. Likely what we are seeing is something like a 1.1x.or 1.2x increase and our minds are exaggerating the effect like an optical illusion.
The concept of measuring any human trait along multiples of the mean via 1x or 2x or 3x or 10x is fundamentally unrealistic when you take a data driven viewpoint of normal distributions. Everyone on this thread is erroneously following this model and while my instincts were more tempered, to a certain extent even I'm following this erroneous model as I declared 3x to be within the realm of reality.
We are all going about this all wrong (including me), the data driven conclusion is that at best you can find 2x engineers and they are freaking rare (because the actual std is nowhere near 1x). The maximum likely delta between the best engineer and worst engineer is 4z, where in this case the z represents 1/2x or an engineer half as good as the average.
Likely people are anecdotally seeing this 4z delta and their mind is exaggerating the delta to 10x. From what we know of statistical reality an actual 10x is unlikely to happen at all.
Sorry, but this is a completely arbitrary definition and honestly one I've never seen so far.
So for IQ, or height, no one can have negative or zero height. This limit effectively limits the std. It is not arbitrary. Try it.
For a distribution of integers on a range from 0 to infinite, let's say the mean is 1. The std will also have a maximum value of 1.
If you add extreme data points to change std, you will also change the mean.
This makes sense right? If you add say 9999999 to a distribution of numbers to keep the average the same you have to counterbalance it with a -9999999 or something like that. But however because the domain is limited from 0 to infinite you can't do that. So effectively the maximum value of the std is the mean itself assuming that the system is normally distributed.
For height, sure, but since IQ scores are defined by the standard deviation of 15, a negative score is possible (you’d expect a single-digit number of people in the world population to have such scores.) Not sure if the typical test resolution is sufficient to distinguish that, though.
In other words the statistical model is not an entirely accurate model of the IQ test. Which to me is what IQ is.
That's just my interpretation though. Regardless of this though, it is highly highly unlikely for engineering productivity to go that deep into the negative. It's also fundamentally impossible to have infinite productivity too. The real domain is for sure some fixed range of numbers which makes the std for sure limited by the distance of the mean to the first number in the range.
By this logic, A 10x engineer is analogous to someone with 1000 IQ or 58 feet in height. We have intuitions about this that is inline with the statistical outcomes I outlined above... and it makes sense to apply these intuitions to the concept of 10x engineers.
You can now define the std to be whatever you want up to 1x. So I take the most ludicrously large std then interpret what the term 10x means in terms of the maximum std.
10x is 10 std from the norm. So the 10x is ludicrously improbable. The real std is likely much lower than this making the concept if 10x even less likely.
And it's wrong. Read the title of this discussion again, "How to be a -10x Engineer" and think about what it means for max. std value.
No one and I mean no one has seen a project accelerate backwards by negative 10. It's akin to -1000iq or -58 feet in height. A "10x" engineer would find this obvious if such a thing existed.
The entire point of my post on statistics is to say 10x or -10x are both fundamentally impossible. Additionally the scale should be 0 to infinite, it does not actually scale negatively. The idea of even -1x is ludicrous. -1x means the project is rapidly disassembling itself and engineers are losing knowledge and intelligence.
Have you read the article? -10x is not about "accelerating backwards", it's about bringing the project to stand still / significantly slowing it down.
And I have seen this multiple times. People who in one way or another managed to slow down other people. Toxic people can create such an environment that the productive people quit. They don't bring smaller value, not even zero value, they bring negative value to the team/project.
> -1x means the project is rapidly disassembling itself and engineers are losing knowledge and intelligence.
I don't know where you come with this arbitrary interpretation of exactly -1, but yes, that happens to projects.
I know the article is generally just talking about bad engineers. However the topic I started here is more about the term 10x.
>And I have seen this multiple times. People who in one way or another managed to slow down other people. Toxic people can create such an environment that the productive people quit. They don't bring smaller value, not even zero value, they bring negative value to the team/project.
Sure but negative progress or -10x progress or 10x progress is just not realistic. The 10 in the term 10x is the thing that is arbitrary. Not only is it arbitrary it's completely inaccurate.
>I don't know where you come with this arbitrary interpretation of exactly -1, but yes, that happens to projects.
Arbitrary definition of 1x? 1x is default -1x would be the default but backwards. It's anything but average. The 10 on 10x is again the arbitrary constant here. Also, Losing knowledge and intelligence is the equivalent of brain damage so are people banging their heads against walls and shooting up on brain damaging drugs? Doubt it. Productivity stops at zero, negative progress is so rare it's basically non-existent.
Pick one. Can't be both.
> 1x is default -1x would be the default but backwards
Not backwards. In terms of value, 1x is a value produced by 1 typical developer. -1x is a decrease of value.
> Also, Losing knowledge and intelligence is the equivalent of brain damage so are people banging their heads against walls and shooting up on brain damaging drugs?
Organizations lose knowledge all the time because people quit because of e.g. toxicity in the workplace (brought by -10x employees).
I guess I'm done with this conversation, it no longer interests me.
Pick what? I didn't pick anything. I'm just laying out examples.
>Not backwards. In terms of value, 1x is a value produced by 1 typical developer. -1x is a decrease of value.
Yeah so my point is -1x is Not arbitrary. You said it is. I simply said it isn't.
>Organizations lose knowledge all the time because people quit because of e.g. toxicity in the workplace (brought by -10x employees).
That's one way of looking at it. It's valid. But by itself I was referring to an honest employee acting to the best of his capability. Like IQ this part cannot be negative. Things like side effects of a bad actor deliberately damaging the company is not something I was referring to. Overall though this type of thing is hard to measure.
>I guess I'm done with this conversation, it no longer interests me.
Sure. That's fine. The conversation is getting into the nitty gritty of interpretation of words which is pointless imo. I think you're pretty clear about what I'm talking about. All in all though my statistical interpretation is still ultimately correct.
> Pick what?
Arbitrary or unrealistic. Utterly obvious from context; you said "arbitrary and unrealistic", they replied "pick one or the other".
Somewhere else you write about "if you only understood what I wrote". Honestly... This shows that the problem there wasn't with someone else's understanding of English, but yours.
At the end of the day it is 10x what, tasks closed (features, bugs, etc) at same or higher quality? Terrible metric but those people exist.
But you can also be a 50/100x engineer if the metric becomes value rather than tasks closed. E.g. convincing key stakeholders their project is a bad idea can save millions, years and companies.
There's plenty of such moments to make huge differences and they compound.
I don't believe 10x engineers actually exist. Maybe 1.5x, 2x, or 3x engineers exist at most. 10x is a huge exaggeration of human capability.
Get this, say a project takes a year to complete. The concept is saying a 10x engineer can do this in about month. If such a person exists it will be so rare I estimate that most people haven't ever encountered an actual "10x" engineer. Even a 3x engineer is super rare. I can see something like 2x happening where a project that takes a year is done in 6 months. That is rare but plausible.
You also might get a lead who can ramp up the effectiveness of an entire team by say 3x at most. If the size of the team was N, then it's N*3X. If N is like 4 then it's a 12x increase. This is the closest thing to an actual 10x engineer. But it's not actually a 10x engineer here it's just better management.