
I believe in the 10x engineer, but - admp
http://erikbern.com/2016/01/08/i-believe-in-the-10x-engineer-but/
======
blakesterz
I work with a 10x engineer, I know they exist. Or at least ONE exists. We'd be
DEAD without him. He's by far the smartest, fastest, and most thorough person
I've worked with since starting in IT in 2000. I'm not sure he knows how good
he really is and I am afraid some day he'll figure it out and leave. He's also
generally nice and humble, and at the same time can be fierce and mean to get
things done. He makes me feel old dumb and slow, and I love it.

~~~
marktangotango
I worked with a guy who everyone thought was 10x, I thought he was shit. This
guy and another built all the systems for this company, and a product that was
the cash cow. Started in 2005 using struts. Everything they built was struts.
They duplicated the entire code base for the next web app. There were like
four versions of this thing customized to do different things (ie trivial shit
like the web sign up form). These guys couldn't even factor out the data
access/service stuff into separate modules for reuse.

When it came time to learn Spring, this guy flailed, and wrote Spring like it
was struts. In addition, he was a pontificating jack ass, real abrasive
personality.

The non technical and business users thought this guy was a super star. I've
only quit a job once because of personalities, and this was that time.

~~~
beagle3
Anecdotal, of course, but .. I've worked with quite a few 10x guys in my time,
none of them _liked_ Java, most of them would consider Java a reason to quit.
It's been a while, I would guess some of them would find Scala acceptable.

~~~
sjg007
I know several 10x Java coders. Honestly though 10x should transcend a
language...

~~~
afarrell
Why would it? Suddenly having to always look up your standard library's basic
functions will slow anyone down.

~~~
ww520
10x guys let the tools do the hard work, like IDE to look up standard
library's basic functions.

Which language has standard library small enough that people can memorize the
whole thing?

~~~
hex13
JavaScript :) Although I keep forgetting some functions even from JS.

~~~
ww520
What are the parameters for Date.setFullYear() again? :)

------
dahart
My translation: labeling an engineer as 10x may be mis-attributing the
discrepancy to individual people, when the causes are most often
environmental. Sure, there are outstanding performers and catastrophic duds
every once in a while, they do exist. But more often than not your performance
is less a reflection of innate skill and more a reflection of things like your
managers, your situation and motivation, your momentum and familiarity with
your tools, the mood in your office, your level of ownership, etc., etc..

I have been both subject and observer of situations where someone's
performance was amazing in some cases and lacking at best in others. I have
experienced being 10x when the situation was right, and 0.5x when it was
wrong.

So how do you make a 10x environment on purpose? I've tried on teams I've led,
and it is by no means easy. Can anyone with concrete experience share reliable
tips?

~~~
rm999
>So how do you make a 10x environment on purpose?

I think there are two necessary parts:

1\. A high level, well-known, agreed-upon plan. Everyone needs to know what
they're working towards, why they're working on it, and how they'll do it.
This lets people work largely autonomously but towards the same goal, reducing
friction. I've been a 0.5x engineer because my manager told me what I needed
to build but not why. So, I'd build something, and the feedback would be "no,
that's not exactly right, just do it this way". What could have taken an hour
would take days while I slowly figured out what he was imagining.

2\. As few blockers as possible. Use tools and languages the whole team knows
or can learn well. Create a collaborative environment where people can ask
questions instead of spending hours working through tiny issues. The manager
should make removing external blockers one of their highest priorities.

This is what allows people to work at peak efficiency. I think when there's
nothing holding them back, most good engineers are "10x" engineers.

~~~
boomzilla
Great points. One thing I would add is to pay a lot of attention to your
team's dynamics. One bad (or just not as engaged) team member could derail the
whole team's morale. Friction should be dealt with immediately, even if it's
really minor.

------
ma2rten
I don't think being a 10x engineer is about engagement, work ethics, ability
to code fast or anything like that.

It's about making great decisions. That includes using the right tools, using
libraries instead of inventing everything yourself, not using libraries when
not appropriate and pushing back on a product decision that does not make
sense.

~~~
overgard
Right, which is why 10x engineers don't really exist in places that don't
value some level of engineer autonomy -- you can't make great decisions if you
can't make decisions at all.

------
braythwayt
Pick one of the following conjectures and argue both sides:

a. There are no 10x engineers, just environments where there is a 10x
discrepancy in productivity.

b. There are no 10x engineers, just 10x yardsticks.

c. There are no 10x engineers, but plenty of .1x engineers.

~~~
StavrosK
C is self-contradicting. "10x engineer" means "an engineer that's ten times
better than most others", and if most others are ten times worse than someone,
then that person is a 10x engineer.

Also, I hate the term "10x engineer". Everything follows a normal
distribution.

~~~
rewqfdsa
> Everything follows a normal distribution.

Evidence suggests that technical talent is bimodal.

~~~
tamana
What evidence? There was a famous study by a college professor 10 years ago,
but he retracted his research as flawed.

------
danbruc
I think the question of 10x engineers is actually ill-defined. There are
developers I can consistently outperform by a factor of ten, do in half a day
what they spent an entire week on and end up with a better solution. They are
not necessarily fresh out of school but somehow managed to survive year after
year even though they don't even know the language they are developing in. And
I don't mean the ugly details of the memory model but basics for professional
developers like generics or interfaces.

But what does that proof? I think nobody doubts that the difference between a
bad developer and a good one can be a factor of ten or more. Outperforming a
good developer by a factor of ten is a totally different story. It is
certainly possible if you have some good insight, if you spot some non-obvious
structure in the problem that you can exploit to make your life a lot easier.
But doing this consistently is probably at least a rear feat.

So the question is to whom do we compare our 10x engineer candidates? The
average one maybe, but the average of what? Your team, your company, the
entire industry? I would argue that the age respectively experience structure
is really important. When you begin you learn a programming language but it
takes some time until you really learn programming, until you reach the point
that the languages no longer matters and you are able to focus on mapping your
problems to more abstract concepts and typing it out in some language becomes
the boring but necessary part of your work.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It proves the industry pays people who are barely competent, and that the
median professional standard isn't high.

Possibly related - it's interesting that everyone has heard of the 10X
developer, but there's no equivalent concept of a 10X company or department,
or even of 10X or 0.1X management.

It's not that the concepts aren't obvious once they're mentioned, it's that -
unlike the 10X programmer - they're _often mentioned._

Is it naive to wonder if management would improve if managers had to worry
about getting tagged with the 0.1X label?

------
tsunamifury
10x engineer is a relative comparison based on the engineers around you, not a
universal ranking. Most of this can be explained by managers who dont know
what they don't know. (Never hired or managed hundreds or thousands)

I have met, hired, and worked with engineers of all stripes and tend to think
this idea is just a mental way of covering that "we have a guy our company or
team relies on to a high risk degree".

10x engineers are a bad sign because it means she or he probably belongs with
a better crew... And someday either they'll realize that or leave for another
reason, exposing our over reliance on them.

------
overgard
I think it's sort of funny when people think 10x engineers don't exist. For
most of us, it's pretty obvious because we've probably worked with one. (If
you haven't: you might want to rethink your job choices :-))

If you think about it, there's essentially no physical or finite limit to how
much you can get done in a day with software (outside of, like, typing speed),
so it boils down to how fast and comprehensively you can think. So you might
think, well, nobody is 10x smarter than anyone else, and that's probably true,
but you could certainly imagine someone that has learned 10x more and has 10x
more experience and given the right context can apply that effectively.

I strongly agree with the no-jerks part. I think, short term, you can be a
jerk and still be effective, but long term if you're unpleasant you'll develop
blind spots because people don't want to deal with you. Once you have
significant blind spots, I suspect it's very hard to maintain the 10x pace.
There is of course, a strong counter example here, which would be someone like
linus torvalds (who is both extremely effective, and, by his own admission,
kind of a jerk), but I think while exceptions like that exist they're not the
common case.

~~~
lotharbot
To be a 10x engineer, you don't have to be 10x smarter. There are a lot of
ways to get to an overall multiplier of 10x.

You can be 2x smarter and 2x more experienced and have 2x better research
skills and 1.25x better administrative skills/support (time management, office
layout, etc.) with the net result of 10x effectiveness.

You can be 12.2% better in 20 different but mutually-reinforcing skill areas.

Or, thought of a different way, an ordinary engineer might solve 90 problems
easily but get bottlenecked on 10 challenges. You can approach 10x by solving
99 problems easily and only bottlenecking on one. Being an outlier isn't
necessarily a matter of one big advantage, but can be about combining a lot of
small advantages.

~~~
overgard
Yeah, I entirely agree. I think sports are a good example of this (because in
most sports, it's much easier to measure performance than in programming).

LeBron James, for instance (arguably the greatest basketball player in the
world), isn't really 2x better at anything compared to other top basketball
players. He can't run twice as fast or jump twice as high. He's just slightly
better at everything. Small things can stack to a large degree. Like, how many
programmers know the important keyboard shortcuts in their development
environment? Obviously it doesn't take a genius to learn keyboard shortcuts,
but shaving 5 seconds off operations here and there can have a huge effect
when you start thinking about how that multiplies in timescales of weeks or
months. (Not that knowing keyboard shortcuts makes you a great developer, just
saying, seemingly minor advantages can be huge multipliers)

~~~
petra
I think the keyboard example hints for something bigger. Yes it's a small
example.But it may allow you to stay in the flow(and optimal focus) better
than someone who'se looking around menus. And the effect is probably non-
linear to effort. And it accumulates. Now every month you get to learn
more/better than the other guy.

So yes, similarly minor things can be huge multipliers , like you say.

------
brikis98
As I've written before [1], I find it confusing that some people believe "10x"
or "rockstar developers" are a myth. Are star athletes, artists, writers, and,
uh, rock stars, a myth? Why would the programming profession be the only one
where there are no major differences in performance?

[1]
[http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2013/09/29/the-10x-developer...](http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2013/09/29/the-10x-developer-
is-not-myth/)

~~~
mattmanser
There are a couple of hundred 10x footballers or artists or writers or what
ever compared to.the millions of people who try to do it.

Somehow there are 10s of thousands of people who think they are 10x engineers
or have somehow hired a 10x engineer.

That's why they aren't actually all these 10x engineers people talk about.

~~~
dxhdr
Okay, here's an extremely unscientific rebuttal to your sports analogy.

There are 13,700 professional athletes in the United States [0], compared to
670,000 amateur athletes in the Amateur Athletic Union [1] (there are surely
many more outside of that particular group but let's go with it). That gives
us a 2% rate of 10x athleticism.

Let's assume that 10x engineers occur at the same rate as athletic
exceptionalism (yes, that's silly but why not). According to another
questionable statistic, there were 1,114,000 software developers in the US in
2014 [2].

Now we've already established that outstanding engineers occur at the same
rate as professional atheletes. What does that give us? Tens of thousands of
professional 10x engineers.

[0] [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/athletes-
and...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/athletes-and-sports-
competitors.htm)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Athletic_Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_Athletic_Union)

[2] [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-
technology/s...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-
technology/software-developers.htm)

------
eCa
Cached:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LVDmwhw...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LVDmwhwQdn4J:erikbern.com/2016/01/08/i-believe-
in-the-10x-engineer-but/&num=1&hl=sv&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

------
RyanZAG
I agree with a lot of the points, but..

 _> Most of the 10x factor is most likely explained by team and company
factors (process, tech stack, etc) and applies to everyone in the
team/company. Intra-team variation is thus much smaller than 10x (even
controlling for the fact that companies tend to attract people of equal
caliber). Nature vs nurture…_

Definitely not true! I have been in companies where 1 engineer outperformed 10
others with everything else being the same and on the same team. It was really
obvious too. It does happen. eg, he could handle 10 bug or feature requests in
the same time it took some of the other engineers to handle 1.

~~~
voidlogic
>Definitely not true! I have been in companies where 1 engineer outperformed
10 others with everything else being the same and on the same team. It was
really obvious too. It does happen.

I believe 2x, 3x maybe 4x but 10x seems far fetched. Are you normalizing for
hours worked in your appraisal of performance?

Per the arguments laid out in Peopleware I am opposed to my team members
working more than 45-50 hours a week outside of rare crunch times.

~~~
RyanZAG
No, same hours worked. Often far less hours worked and more accomplished!

I've seen some people read through a bug report and have the area found and
fixed in a couple of minutes, and the bug passing QA first time.

I've seen other people take almost the whole day just to track down that same
bug in the code, let alone fix it or get it past QA. By that time, the first
guy had finished a whole stream of other tasks.

10x definitely exists - hop around a few companies and you'll come across one
pretty quick. They are rare, but easy enough to find if you've been through a
few startups.

~~~
voidlogic
Maybe its just that I look around and I am more willing to label a poor
performer a .25x coder, than I am someone who can really crank it out a 10x.

I think the x-factor we are talking about is too abstract to really have
meaning. For example, besides speed, my x-factor takes into account things
like test coverage, maintainability, code performance, etc. When you make it
very multi-dimensional it tends to even people out as folks often have very
different strengths and weaknesses.

~~~
RyanZAG
Sounds like a case for specializing your developers into parts of the process
that they are most proficient in.

However, I have seen developers who are incredible in all of those aspects and
simply run rings around regular good developers. People who you can give a
problem and they've already designed a fairly novel algorithm for best case
complexity in 15 minutes to handle it. These people exist and they are not 1x
developers, unless creating novel mathematical proofs in 15 minutes counts as
1x ....

------
amelius
If there are things a 10x engineer can build, that no amount of 1x engineers
can build, then "the 10x engineer" is actually a misnomer.

~~~
cturner
Yes. Spolsky has a better term for the same idea - he describes an engineer
who can hit the high notes.
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html)

------
throwthis
> I’ve never met the legendary “10x jerk”. Anecdotally the outperforming
> engineers are generally nice and humble.

Anecdotally, I have.

~~~
jftuga
What were they like?

~~~
emcq
I can think of two people who might fit this bill. Both have a propensity to
jump to conclusions and not fully understand various perspectives before
passing judgements and weighting their judgements significantly more than
others who are more knowledgeable and familiar with a problem (aka big ego).
Brilliant by themselves but very difficult interacting with others.

Imagine a quick thinker from an accomplished competitive programming and math
background who has a raging ego and a chip on their shoulder. From what I've
observed some companies see this in interviews and won't hire despite solving
the technical challenges significantly better than others.

~~~
johansch
Some of the people I've worked with who fit this description have this
tendency to jump to conclusions. But they also love debating, and correctly
feel no shame in changing their positions once proven wrong.

I have found that many people find debates uncomfortable. I love them. They
create value.

(In fact, whenever I meet these people I've met from previous jobs, inevitably
we end up arguing intensely about random stuff. And enjoying it...)

~~~
emcq
The no shame in changing positions is key; it describes the difference between
humble and egotistical or science and religion.

I think you're right that many 10xrs like to debate, and that value can come
out of debate. However the best 10xr Ive worked with was equally at home with
a 3+ hour technical debate or collaborating with folks who don't give their
best contributions during debates. Brilliant, efficient, effective,
collaborative, quick, and humble.

~~~
johansch
Somewhat off-topic:

I'm not sure I can be described as "humble". I do however place extreme
importance on sincerity, particularly in debates. (Being able to switch
positions when proven wrong is another essential part, of course.)

------
beagle3
Vert relevant: [http://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-
selective.html](http://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html) ( and the not-
so-long HN discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5577722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5577722)
)

------
preordained
The 10x thing is like some weird, less quantifiable, engineer analog to Mensa.

------
whatever_dude
IMO a 10x engineer is, more often than not, just a well-positioned engineer -
the right person at the right place and right time.

Someone working within their field of expertise, with the tools to get it
done, and without the typical roadblocks that stand in the way. Hopefully
you've been there and know how it feels.

And maybe you've also been at the other side of the spectrum, working with an
ever-changing, badly designed and documented piece of technology, with many
surprise problems biting you in the ass, ever changing goals, and bad
management decisions.

I've been a 10x engineer at times. But I know I've also been a 0.5x engineer.
The knowledge on how to solve a problem and how to find an answer doesn't
change, but the perceived throughput of a person definitely does.

~~~
workitout
Agreed, there are no 10x engineers, we all have 10x moments in time once in a
while. We all have moments when we feel we can't tie our own shoelaces without
help.

~~~
aczerepinski
Of course there are outliers. Nobody disputes that Jordan was a 10x basketball
player (probably closer to 100x when compared against the true mean and not
just among professional players). Nobody disputes that Coltrane was a 10x jazz
musician. Why would software be unique among all fields by not having any
outliers?

~~~
TillE
You're talking about exceptional geniuses, of which there are maybe a few
dozen in a given field across an entire generation of people.

Every two-bit company is demanding "10x engineers". _That_ is what doesn't
exist. There are not tens of thousands of genius software developers in the
world.

~~~
whatever_dude
I think this is the problem, and my main concern with the overuse of "10x
engineer": they don't live in a vacuum.

If you hire a 10x engineer and get him to move a button two pixels left, and
then tomorrow someone else tell him to move the button two pixels right, he
won't be a 10x engineer, he'll be a 0x engineer. There's a lot more involved
and it compounds. An engineer knowing what to do and _what not do_ (a skill
often overlooked) can help immensely, but everyone needs plenty of support to
be at their 10x.

------
YngwieMalware
The "10x engineer" I worked for quit and left me with an extremely over-
complicated piece of software to manage. He's a sweet guy and a good friend,
but really left me holding the bag because he was not happy.

~~~
StavrosK
Did they build it? Because I dispute that someone is a 10x engineer if they
build overcomplicated pieces of software. A good engineer builds according to
the business' needs, maintainability, scalability, and a whole bunch of other
considerations. Just building the cleverest thing you can build is poor
engineering.

~~~
mrighele
What looks overcomplicated to a 1x engineer may be quite simple to the 10x.
This in fact the most painful point to overcome with them: that not everybody
is as skilled as them so the software should be designed and written
accordingly.

In my (limited) experience, those that don't learn this tend to do all by
themselves "because the others can't do shit", get overworked and are
unpleasant to work with. Those who do are able instead to focus on the most
important (and interesting) parts while letting the others taking their boring
share.

~~~
qb45
> not everybody is as skilled as them so the software should be designed and
> written accordingly.

I don't know if I'm a 10x dev, but I've heard this mantra few times.

It's most annoying when it happens because I actually strive to make something
simple. Like I once needed to index members of some C++ STL container, so I
used _std::map <key, container::iterator>_. It went like that:

    
    
      - WTF? A map of iterators? It's complicated! Remove it!
      - But the objects need to sit in this container and this extra index is also required.
      - But... but.. It's complicated! Remove it!
    

Man, I hate people at times.

~~~
marshray
I can relate to a situation where a container of iterators is the seemingly
correct solution yet not necessarily the best thing to adopt for maintenance
considerations.

Containers tend to persist over relatively large blocks of code, whereas
iterator invalidation can be very tricky and most people get bitten by it at
some point.

------
anupshinde
I think I have been a 10x programmer having being called that and I am like
that because it suits my work style. Its hard for me to work slow. But its
also not possible to be 10x all the time - I am mostly that way in the early
phases of the project and the X multiplier gradually comes down to 1 or 2. For
example - when it comes to defect fixing in somebody else's code, devops and
monotonous stuff - I might be less than 1x.

However, I have noticed that whenever I am called 10X guy, something happens
and I ultimately end up to being 1x or leaving the company. The following are
kind of negative thoughts/symptoms that occurred

1\. In most companies - it means doing 10 times work while getting paid just
5-20% higher instead of 10 times higher (here 10 is just an example
multiplier).

2\. It means I am a workaholic - and others enjoying the benefits of my work
because of (1)

3\. The above two can potentially result into toxicity build up within me and
then within the team. It does happen occasionally and I have to work harder to
avoid it.

4\. You are not with your own kind (like species on a mental plane and not
race/religion) and your growth is limited. I ended up leaving companies or
teams when I was called out-performer consistently - not because I was an out
performer, but because I was not learning much from the team. (On 4) - I tried
to stay in one company like this, because it was hard for them to fire me for
obvious reasons. Ultimately I got fed up after few years. I also
unsuccessfully tried to get fired by deliberately underperforming, because the
severance was too good - but they wouldn't derate me or fire me. Finally I
resigned and left on good terms. Retrospectively thinking, I wasted those few
precious years of my life

5\. One gets used to elitism - and that is a very bad thing. It closes the
persons mind. I remember how I disregarded an amazing solution from a junior
team member because I was comfortable with my way of doing things.
Unfortunately, I realized the mistake a bit too late.

6\. If I am a rabbit I am constantly worried about the turtles - they will
beat me with consistent performance over longer run because I will get bored
of the race.

Also, I don't think having a 10x engineer in a team as a good thing. And if
everybody is 10x, then nobody is - which can be good.

~~~
sleazebreeze
On #5: This same thing happened to me. A junior dev came up with an ingenious
solution for something that would have taken weeks and been a major
maintenance headache going forward. The team had been putting off developing
it for months because of that. She proposed the idea to me and asked if it was
an awful hack and my initial reaction was "yes", but then I swallowed my pride
enough to add on "..but here's how we can make it work".

------
lhnz
> The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more
> efficient.

I thought being a 10x engineer meant being able to achieve a task which could
not be achieved by 10 average engineers.

Does it mean the ability to do 10x the amount of work than everybody else?
That doesn't seem extraordinary, that's mostly a case of focus.

In general I dislike the egotism attached to the idea that one engineer is the
cause of other engineer's productivity. That's a lame way of self-
congratulating.

------
collyw
but... Error establishing a database connection

Almost seem appropriate given the title.

I personally see my own productivity improve by about 4 fold given the right
conditions - i.e. being able to focus on the one task at hand, not jumping
between projects and not being interrupted with questions every half hour.
Anyway that's my comment having not read the article.

------
jqm
I've been a 10x developer. But it wasn't all me that did it... it was those
around me being .1x. So ya... it does take a team to make 10x programmer.

I can't claim I was 10x smarter than my coworkers. I wasn't. But I knew how to
use tools that were at least 2x better and put in at least 5x the effort.
Looking back it's amazing how little effort my co-workers (and boss) did put
in at that place. Public sector for you I guess. I soon moved on to greener
pastures. Some places value 10x. But other places it's better to do the bare
minimum to avoid threatening anyone or raising the expectation bar. Sad
working conditions best avoided by those with desire to create or improve. A
good place for those who claim 10x developers don't exist to seek employment.

------
theseoafs
> The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more
> efficient. Someone can be a 10x engineer if they do nothing for 364 days
> then convinces the team to change programming language to a 2x more
> productive language.

Seriously?

~~~
rewqfdsa
The article goes on to suggest that there are "1000x" engineers who can do
things other engineers cannot do. The article intentionally obfuscates the
point to try to disguise the idea that talent really does vary tremendously
and that no amount of teamwork can match rare insight.

It's become politically fashionable to discount the contributions of
individuals, because if we think about differences in talent and follow the
implications, we're led to crimethink. There was even an article on HN a
little while ago suggesting Einstein didn't really do anything important and
that his discoveries were just a product of his time.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>The article goes on to suggest that there are "1000x" engineers who can do
things other engineers cannot do.

It's a very easy statement to make but really hard to prove. I will probably
never write a solid OS kernel, but I'm also not going to spend 5 years trying
to learn all of the concepts and hard-won knowledge just to prove that I can
when I really don't want to be doing it in the first place. Especially when
you can back out of that original argument by saying "Oh, well you were 10x,
you just didn't know it".

I also haven't read too much about career progression for engineers which
plays into all of this, i.e., what percentage of 10x should I be after 6
months? 1 year? 5? 10? What skills should I possess on that career timeline?
The answer right now is pretty much open-ended.

------
wildmXranat
I feel that the most fitting medium for rebuttal to portions or whole, is a
separate article.

Having said that, I have seen projects and management lean on one or two guys
out of a whole group to deliver the quick and mostly working plumbing + base
work. And then pass off the polish work to the 1x or 0.5x employees.

Also, I saw no link between output and 'being a jerk', and that is highly
anecdotal.

This is a similar way that sports teams work, or certain skills propel you to
a different rank in army. Office work seems mundane, but management is well
aware of the ghost benefits for hiring multiple-x engineers at 1.15x the
salary.

------
Alex3917
> There’s no such thing as a 10x engineer spending time on something that
> never ends up delivering business value. If something doesn’t deliver
> business value, it’s 0x.

If it's your company then by all means you should listen to everyone's advice.
But if it's not your company then you should give your advice, but if your
employer doesn't want it then that's their issue. At that point there's no
ethical imperative on your part to try to prevent your business from going
bankrupt, so as long as the checks keep clearing I don't see the issue.

~~~
ma2rten
It's not about ethical imperative, but ...

1\. It doesn't look good on your CV if you only worked on projects that don't
have any business value.

2\. If what you do does not have any value chances are someone will figure out
at some point.

3\. It's not fun to work on a project that has no value for anyone. This is
the kind of thing that will create burnout.

If what you are doing is very intellectually challenging for you, or it has
value other than business value then it might be different.

~~~
Grishnakh
>1\. It doesn't look good on your CV if you only worked on projects that don't
have any business value.

I completely disagree. If you work on a really cool project that's very
technically interesting, that looks great on a resume.

Do you really think your interviewer (at the company you're applying for a new
job at) is going to call the old employer and ask them "Hey, did this project
on this guy's resume delivery any real business value?" Of course not. They
only go by what you write on your resume, so you can spin it however you like.
If it was an interesting project but was shit-canned because of bad management
or bad timing or whatever, you don't put that part. You talk it up in the
interview when asked about it, talk about how technically interesting it was,
what you learned there, etc., you don't volunteer that it ended up being a
bust. Even if you have to spill that (because you're specifically asked), you
concentrate on the good points, how it was a great learning experience, how
what you developed should be useful on future projects, etc.

Prospective employers are looking for skills and experience you have which
will help _them_ in the future. How financially successful some project you
worked on was is really irrelevant, since there's far more to the success of a
project than just the technical aspects. Lots of companies have built
technically superb products only to have them fail in the marketplace because
of bad marketing, other bad management decisions, too much competition, etc.
OS/2 was completely superior to Windows 3.1 and 95 yet it failed in the
marketplace; that doesn't mean that you wouldn't hire a guy who worked on it.

------
phunge
The author wrote Luigi at Spotify, which is a pretty good example of a small
amount of code with immense leverage on other people's productivity.

------
manigandham
It's important to define 10x terms - what businesses care about is
productivity and revenue, even if the
code/structure/architecture/documentation/whatever isn't top notch.

And there are definitely people that can produce 10x the output and make far
more meaningful progress for a company than others.

------
lifeisstillgood
I have made my peace with this pernicious meme. I have decided that as a ok
developer who can sometimes shoe flashes of insight and produce some good
code,

I will do what _ghostbusters_ recommend :

\- when someone asks

\- are you a 10x engineer?

I will reply

\- yes

And not try to disabuse non technical folks from their nice comforting ideas
about how development really happens

------
smoyer
I'm a 10x engineer - under perfect conditions.

But I think focusing on this work is wrong-headed. As noted in the article,
making 5 other developers twice as efficient is roughly equivalent. The
difference is that I can't sustain a 10x rate (I do a lot of "research
programming" where I'm probing a domain rather than producing production
code), while there's a good chance that training other developers will
translate into a 2x (or better) increase in the team's productivity.

------
mamon
This reminds me another piece I read some time ago (google cache to rescue as
site seems to be down):

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ikC6A7V...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ikC6A7VPdewJ:www.techfounder.net/2013/04/04/there-
are-no-x10-developers-but-there-are-
certainly-110-ones/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=pl)

------
SonicSoul
is this just another label to refer to someone more effective at what they do,
i.e. "ninja" or "black belt" ? or is it based on Peter Thiel's 10x technology
or innovation leap?

------
raverbashing
Oh yeah, the 1/10 engineers are a problem as well (and 1/20, etc)

Usually a mix of not knowing how to use docs, google things or just stick to
their old ways (the 1/20 miraculously find bugs on well tested software used
by lots of people - at least that's what they think)

------
spajus
10x engineers exist, and this post was submitted by one. Hi admp :)

------
bavcyc
By engineer he means programmer? developer?

------
gonyea
"...if they do nothing for 364 days then convinces the team to change
programming language to a 2x more productive language."

If you bike-shed programming languages then I'm throwing you out the nearest
window.

------
johansch
I really think this list has a lot of truth to it.

"There’s no such thing as a 10x engineer spending time on something that never
ends up delivering business value. If something doesn’t deliver business
value, it’s 0x."

I have found myself to work really well as a "value enabler" of 10x engineers.
It's a symbiosis thing - my best work has been done working with a 10x
engineer with our skills complementing each other (I'm strong on the business
value/UX side, defining overall architecture/network protocols/optimizations
etc, but weak in e.g. hardcore C low-level implementation.)

A challenge: Whenever I've stopped spending 20 hours a week working closely
with these guys (in order to focus on building other essential parts of the
business where there are no 10x engineers), their output value has severely
decreased. They often fall back to like 2-3x. (Really nothing to be ashamed
of, but...)

Things like this can make company switching challenging :).

------
rewqfdsa
Companies die when they lose their competitive spirit, and start valuing
internal considerations over technical effectiveness. One symptom of this
inevitable disease is denying the reality of the 10x engineer, or start to
think that being a jerk somehow negates technical accomplishments. It's
because every company inevitably succumbs to this disease that startups can
frequently wreck established players; the latter forget what's really
important.

------
rewqfdsa
Focusing on personality characteristics of great engineers is how lesser
engineers try to maintain their position in the status hierarchy when they
know they can't compete on technical merit. A healthy company recognizes this
dynamic and shuts it down. An unhealthy company indulges it.

~~~
danharaj
Focusing on technical merit is how lesser engineers try to maintain their
position in the status hierarchy when they know they can't cooperate and
coordinate as well as others.

------
alexashka
Just look at LeBron James.

He's the 10x of basketball.

The team gets built around him.

Same goes for 10x anything. Steve Jobs was the 10x of CEO, company built
around him, etc etc.

To say the causes are environmental is just to live in denial. There are
people out there waaaaay smarter than you. Or way more athletic, way more X.

This doesn't negate the importance of getting along and being able to build
teams around 10x people but make no mistake - id Software was John Carmack and
everyone else. Same goes for anything else wildly successful.

