The thesis is that the "10x engineers" don't output a linear multiple of the same kind of work their peers do. Instead, they implement solutions that their peers wouldn't or couldn't over any length of time.
It’s interesting how obvious this is for other domains. For example, imagine you are hiring for an orchestra, and are told just to increase the violin section by five to make up for the lack of good violinists.
The 10x engineer identifies common subproblems across different problems, and then creates a layer of reusable code which becomes a library. Then uses this library to write code 10x faster.
The 10x engineer tries to standardize problems and solve them en-masse.
The 1x engineer sees every problem as a different problem that requires a different solution.
The 10x engineer talks about abstractions, the 1x engineer talks about concrete implementations.
The 10x engineer believes in investing in productivity. The 1x engineer wants a visible solution right now.
The 1x engineer never has time because they're too busy making themselves less productive by owning more and more code to maintain. The 10x engineer is always looking for code to remove and refactor, and making the solution as small as possible.
The 10x engineer will talk about programming language features and libraries that promote reusability, the 1x engineer only talks about tangible stuff.
The 1x engineer talks about their car and weekend, the 10x engineer talks about technology.
I check all of the 10x engineer boxes from above, or at least I think I do, and that speaks as if I am a 10x engineer but I genuinely don't think I am. I think 10x engineer is something different. 10x engineer usually doesn't care about the things from above.
I think it is more about the ability to grasp vast amounts of complexity in relatively short amount of time and be able to sustain it. Business and market wise this is what is going to make a difference. Some engineers aren't even able to tackle such complexity because of so much layers of it which is why at some moment it just becomes ... too much. Others that can do it, it would take them considerably larger amount of time to do it.
> The 1x engineer talks about their car and weekend, the 10x engineer talks about technology.
Call me a proud member of the 1x engineer club. When I close my laptop at the end of the day or even when I’m having lunch with my coworkers, few people would know that I’m an “engineer” at all. The list of things that I care about more than technology in my non work life is a mile long. Technology is a means to an end - to support my addiction to food and shelter.
This is fine for a certain class of work, and disastrous when applied to another class of work.
To use an analogy a physician's assistant[1] doing brain surgery could be a big problem. if you need the latter. Also, you're probably overpaying if you hire the latter to administer Tylenol ...
Spoiler alert: most of the 2.7 million developers in the US aren’t “solving hard problems”. I interact with the people who are writing the services for the largest cloud provider. When I meet them for lunch, they are seldomly talking about work.
For awhile, I was working with the service teams involved with the various AI services trying to publish an open source demo around their services. When we left for lunch we were talking about travel, cars, our families, places to eat, etc.
I bet the well adjusted ones don’t talk about plumbing in every sentence.
There is so much more to life than technology - this is coming from someone who did hobby programming in assembly language on four different processors by the time I graduated - in 1996.
I sincerely doubt the 10x brain surgeon talks only about brain surgery in their downtime. I would assert that a true 10x person is smart enough to maintain good work-life balance.
There is an infinite pool work you can do. Smart, real 10x’ers understand what is a priority and are smart enough to pack their shit at the end of the day, go home and do nothing at all with their work.
I've been a 10x engineer, I've been a 1x engineer, and I've been a 0.5x engineer. There isn't some consistent set of things, it's a ton of circumstance.
Now, as a leader type, I would prefer to hire 1x engineers to 10x engineers, for a whole litany of reasons. 1x engineers are largely predictable, where as 10x can be 10x in any wild direction, because they're more or less deciding for themselves a bunch of shit they really shouldn't be.
10x engineers like to decide for themselves things like how to go to market or which features to build in what order, without doing any of the requisite research or information gathering necessary. It's infuriating because 10x engineers think passion or some arbitrary definition of "Correctness" gives them power, when in reality they're just operating with a heavily limited set of information (gee, I wonder how they had all that time to build stuff, maybe because they weren't attending meetings???).
Sorry, this turned into a not-very-coherent rant, but the point is 10x engineers aren't worth hiring as anything other than literally employee #1, and even then it's a huge dice roll.
Well if you honestly find the pointless complicated code you write for whatever stupid pointless startup more interesting than cars I guess maybe I just think you’re a moron? Wasn’t that the point of my original post???
I bike and walk more than you do by the way. Actually come to think of it my van has appreciated! LOL!
Because they are smart enough to realize they could make a shitload more money in their current occupation and treat their cycling as a hobby. Often times once you make your hobby turn into an job it no longer is fun. …maybe… never actually tested that theory personally so I don’t actually know if it is true.
The thesis is that the "10x engineers" don't output a linear multiple of the same kind of work their peers do. Instead, they implement solutions that their peers wouldn't or couldn't over any length of time.
This matches my experience.