Ask HN: How can I become a 10X engineer? - lsr_ssri
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davismwfl
Realize your role is to make the business more money, productive and/or
efficient. Engineers that spend their time on problems that matter are the
ones that are decidedly 10x. Not wasting time on issues that don't matter is
more critical than anything. So many super intelligent people I have met spend
their time on issues that won't advance the business, and doing so makes you
average instead of exceptional.

If you want to be exceptional, worry about what you need to produce to make
the business better, not what is important to you. That makes you more
valuable than other engineers and makes you a 10x engineer. At least this is
my experience and hence opinion.

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quickthrower2
The definition of 10x is 10x the worst engineer, not 10x the average. (From
Peoplesoft). Anyway, that aside:

It depends what you are measuring, but if you can figure out what is making
your team inefficient - could be a technical, human or commercial problem, and
solve it, then you are 10x in my opinion. Typing faster on VIM isn't what it's
about.

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usgroup
Well, you could find someone that doesn't do any engineering and compare
yourself to them. That'll do it :)

I kid, but seriously forget the hype. The way you get better at anything by
any amount is usually a bit at a time, and the tricks are the same: plan,
practice and optimise.

If you don't know where you're lacking then you'll only ever get better
incidentally, so try and know where you're lacking. If you don't know what you
want to get better at then you'll only be growing relevantly incidentally, so
have a plan.

With plan and self-awareness in hand it's just practice, optimise, rinse and
repeat: this works for just about everything.

For my mentality (and this isn't universally preferable), if you have to
compare yourself to others, then pick comparators that you're always worse
than. If you beat your comparators quickly pick new ones. Don't ever be "the
best" because if you actually believe it, you won't be it for long.

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kspaans
Make 10 other people 2X as productive!

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paulcole
What's your reason for wanting this? Do you want to be higher paid, have more
choice in the work you do, be in charge of others, or something else?

Odds are there's a much better way to achieve whatever your goal is.

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itamarst
Instead of focusing on being 10×, I like focusing on producing the same amount
of value, with only 10% of the effort. Mathematically the same, but much more
approachable and meaningful goal.

That means avoiding unnecessary features, not wasting time on dead ends, not
wasting time on speed when speed doesn't matter, and so on and so forth.

Long version:
[https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/)

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dagw
10X at producing code or 10X at producing value for you clients/company?

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chadcmulligan
not sure but I'd say minimum requirements: know assembler, know C, know SQL,
know Relational Design, know Network engineering learn how to read an RFC,
know how a browser works. learn hardware engineering, build an Arduino for
example. Then pick a field and keep going.

edit: oh and learn some maths, linear algebra, numerical maths, some calculus
to start with

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avoidwork
practice like a pro athlete. the common belief that you need 10k hours to
master something is imo, applicable to a 10x dev. when you hit 10k, if it's
only during work hours you've likely mastered whatever mattered to your
manager/org in that time frame, but that is not always transferrable or
valuable to a new manager/org; practice is though.

practice creates experience, and if you have the resolve to push yourself out
of your comfort zone and learn to master new areas, you should find yourself
able to do things quicker than people that aren't familiar with the problem
domains, easily attaining a 10x output while not creating problems.

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arthurcolle
just some thoughts

Obviously step 1) is mastering all the fundamentals of CS. Once you know all
the fundamentals of CS, master your particular stack so deeply that you can
use them at will like a toolbox for any situation that presents itself. try to
learn as many proglamgs as possible as they all teach you different ways of
thinking.

Assuming you have a decent handle on more advanced ds+a I would say if you
want to be a 10x engineer, you have to put in the effort to become 10x better
than your peers/mentors and it just requires being handed problems you don't
know how to do and then using all of your mental focus and all of your energy
to get it done as fast as possible while also ensuring that its the shortest
bit of code that could conceivably satisfy its specification. You can imitate
this by doing random coding challenges online. They are fairly difficult at
first but over time you pick up the little trickery here and there that
sometimes gets in the way of properly understanding what the problem is truly
asking.

Have the hunger to go the extra mile even if you're tired and keep devouring
every bit of information you can get your hands on, and constantly be
resynthisizing the whole of what you know into a coherent set of facts based
on evidence. Instead of lazily re-using the same patterns over and over
question everything and determine from 1st principles whether something makes
sense or not.

Output needs to be 10x more than the best "non-10x engineer" to really count.

Makes me wonder how many 10X engineers does Google [claim] to have?

~~~
arthurcolle
*proglangs

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mettamage
I met three 10X engineers in my life. They started early and therefore got a
lot of practice in by the time they went to college (both professionally and
with side projects).

You can watch a video from one of them here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18214738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18214738)

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takanori
Tackle the hardest problems and solve them.

or

Attach yourself to the areas that have the highest business impact and produce
results...

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dabockster
You become a 10X engineer when you realize that the 10X engineer really
doesn't exist. It's just a term that stack rankers love to use to defend their
need to stack rank. Nothing but big egos. You don't need that noise.

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facorreia
A big part of it is being wise about what code should not be written. Either
the KISS principle or just being very conscious about costs and benefits.

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Jean-Vincent31
I asked the same question to myself a few days ago. I believe in our connected
world, we should share knowledges more faster. For engineering and
programming, [https://www.connectix.fr/](https://www.connectix.fr/) is
launching really soon and aims to help developer to become better developer

