I suspect that the strong disagreements between people on this thread on whether 10x engineers exist or not say more about the diversity of HN'er team composition than anything else.
If you put a competent coder among a bunch of not-entirely-stupid, well willing, but mediocre programmers, he can quickly be 10x as productive. He will also clearly stand out as such. Put the same coder among other competent coders, and nobody will notice anything special.
If this is true, there can only be two options:
- Hanselman only ever worked with mediocre engineers
- Hanselman only ever worked with truly competent engineers.
Hm. Given recent stories about Microsoft's employee quality downfall, something about my thesis must be wrong. That, or Microsoft really does mostly hire people in the rightmost quartile of a bell curve.
But anyway, no matter whether this idea makes sense, I believe that it never pays to try to hire "10x people". If you find that you managed to find one, it simply means that the most of your team has been underperforming. Get rid of them and replace by one or two other decent ones. Maybe the first mr 10x has some friends?
If you put a competent coder among a bunch of not-entirely-stupid, well willing, but mediocre programmers, he can quickly be 10x as productive. He will also clearly stand out as such. Put the same coder among other competent coders, and nobody will notice anything special.
If this is true, there can only be two options:
Hm. Given recent stories about Microsoft's employee quality downfall, something about my thesis must be wrong. That, or Microsoft really does mostly hire people in the rightmost quartile of a bell curve.But anyway, no matter whether this idea makes sense, I believe that it never pays to try to hire "10x people". If you find that you managed to find one, it simply means that the most of your team has been underperforming. Get rid of them and replace by one or two other decent ones. Maybe the first mr 10x has some friends?