
Ask HN: What are A-player or 10x Dev attributes? - sharemywin
What are the best attributes to hire someone technical? Also, from what perspective: are you a lead, developer, or something else?
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PaulHoule
I think A-player managers quit looking for 10x devs like all the B-player and
C-players do, but instead they build procedures and systems that get 10x
performance out of teams.

My advice for those who want to be 10x devs is that you have to rigorously
purge bullshit from your job. If you spend 1/4 of your time in useless
meetings and the project is going in circles, you are going to get nowhere no
matter how smart you are unless you can break managment of it's stupor or move
to another job.

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CuriouslyC
I think there are multiple different type of A player developers:

There are "researcher" developers that given a tough problem can come up with
an excellent solution. If you gave the same problem to someone less competent,
you would get a hack with lots of problems, or possibly no solution at all.

There are also "coder" developers that given a well fleshed out specification,
can crank out code at break-neck speed.

You can tell research developers in interviews by proposing large-scale
problems and asking them how they'd approach finding solutions. Do they get
excited, or freeze up? Big tell.

To get coder developers, open source project activity is probably the best
indicator. If someone is part of several open source project teams and has
active forks and a commit history, that is a good indicator.

Once you have people like this, when managing them, you need to make sure that
you assign tasks based on their strength. Coders are great as project
maintainers, researchers will probably find a new job if you put them in a
maintainer role. Likewise, coders aren't going to be happy if you don't have
well fleshed out requirements/spec for them to chew on, while researchers view
that as a license to let their creativity run wild.

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sharemywin
toptal does 100 million and I was wondering, how did a kid just out of college
figure out the magic formula? or did they?

sounds like a sweat shop:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10107448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10107448)

