But I think he's right too. He's essentially arguing about the true meaning of the metric. Of course there are engineers who can spot bugs at 1/100th the time as an arbitrary engineer. Or fixes things 10x faster (being familiar with the code base certainly helps).
But to have the literal productive capacity of 10 people? That's much different, and that's what he means. Are you capable of replacing 10 arbitrary engineers with the rockstar? No? Then that's not a 10x engineer, by his definition.
My old manager handed Mr 10x a company chequebook and said "write your own salary in there… just don't leave". He left. He wanted challenging work more than he wanted money.
These people exist in all fields: maths, art, music, literature, sport. It is amazing (and somewhat dispiriting) when you meet one, however working with one is, in my experience, only inspiring.
He was an intern like me but he was carrying the whole team. Solving problems, implementing features left and right.
Never really did talk to the team, other than meetings, just did his work and locked himself in his cubicle.
During our internship he studied for and took a couple of scjp and c++ certifications just because he was bored not studying for exams.
I miss that guy. Not that sociable but really really fucking efficient as a developer.
I believe you meant "He's anecdotally wrong because I've worked with 10x developers."
To be empirically wrong, you'd have to contradict it with some empirical rather than anecdotal evidence.
Now, in this case, confounding factors probably aren't a problem, but if 10x developers are one in a million or one in a billion, an anecdote about how someone, somewhere actually met one once isn't very helpful to the rest of us.
- How much of his contribution would you rate as technical vs understanding the domain, understanding of the systems and seeing through explicit requirements to the underlying need (you might see where I am leading).
actually that's several questions right there.
I am just fascinated by the idea of 10x: my personal assumption is it is like professional football stars - there are those who are paid 1000x, who probably win 10x but as athletes and players will be only a fraction of x better than the lowliest professional player and into the Sunday leagues.
However in these fraction of x cases other things come to play - like coach, team spirit, team quality, tactics etc. and in the software field I expect a similar disjunction to occur - knowing the system under maintenance perfectly, understanding / influencing the business requirements, as much as raw technical ability.
for example David Beckham is probably 10x player compared to say a professional in the first division. this does not mean he scores 10x as much or retains possession 10x or any other metric you like. but that teams with him in win 10x because of the leverage of the in tease in ability he does have.
and leverage is out of this world in software.
so just interested - is your ex-Collegue a david Beckham of c++ ? or is he truly a god?
A few years ago I worked with a guy there whose output, productivity, and smart solutions combined with godlike C++ coding ability made him probably 100x more effective than anyone else in the place.
This was in the front office at Goldman Sachs, so the rest of us weren't completely useless. He was just in a different league though.
I have also worked with a 10x developer who carried a small company of around 50.