Pity they never read the study where the 10x comes from, it's not 10x more productive than the average engineer, it's 10x more productive than the worst engineer.
> but I do believe that there are "10x engineers".
It's very difficult to read past this statement.
However, the follow-up almost redeems it:
> That said, the criteria put forward by the follow up tweets are almost entirely garbage.
The tweet he's responding to is hot garbage and it's good that any sane person rejects it.
Let's be clear though: There are no 10x engineers (as the industry understands the term, which is about individual excellence over one's peers).
There are are engineers who reduce the effectiveness of their peers, so they can claim to be 10x as effective as them.
There are 0.1x engineers, whom the average engineer can compare themselves to and decide they're a 10x engineer. I've worked with several over the years! (One in particular was more keenly interested in trying to convert his coworkers to his religion than actual work.)
The reason there aren't 10x engineers is, most engineering of sufficient scale or significance is done as a team, not as an individual.
My comment isn't sour grapes either. I rewrote a cryptography library in pure PHP, almost entirely on my own. I have an open source library for most security problems that the PHP ecosystem has managed to cook up, and I'm the sole contributor to most of them. People have called me a "10x engineer" before.
I reject the title, and you should too.
We can all accomplish more by working together than we can silo'd.
Build bridges, not walls. Gatekeeping and arrogance are both stupid.
I don't really agree with this laundry list of 'best practices for every engineer to be a good cog'.
I've seen whole chunks of big commercial operating systems that are basically written by one anti-social guy. And our lore is full of examples of individual contributors who weren't team players; often, they were one-man armies.
Tto my mind, _those_ are the 10x devs. They are the devs that your startup should hire...
... because otherwise if you hire the cogs that match this article's list, you are going to need 10x or 100x as many devs, and they'll probably only manage to make a mediocre shopping cart and nothing else works. But, look on the bright side, it'll be CIed up the whatsit and use all the latest cloud stuff and untested frameworks, so all is good on the resumes ;)
e.g. if you mentor 10x10x engineers are you automatically becoming a 100x engineer?
what about CTOs? I mean CTOs that have 100 100x engineers? Are the (Kilo|Mega)-Engineers?
I think I'm a 15x engineer, is it ok to put it on the resume?
But well.. I mean that, again, depends who you ask. If you ask a 100x engineer about 10x engineer, they will tell you that 10x engineer is just a 1x engineer (assuming there is a chamber and no exposure to the 0.01x engineers)
On the other hand, my grandma might qualify as a 0.01x engineer (she's good with her smartphone)
7 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 39.5 ms ] threadIt's very difficult to read past this statement.
However, the follow-up almost redeems it:
> That said, the criteria put forward by the follow up tweets are almost entirely garbage.
The tweet he's responding to is hot garbage and it's good that any sane person rejects it.
Let's be clear though: There are no 10x engineers (as the industry understands the term, which is about individual excellence over one's peers).
There are are engineers who reduce the effectiveness of their peers, so they can claim to be 10x as effective as them.
There are 0.1x engineers, whom the average engineer can compare themselves to and decide they're a 10x engineer. I've worked with several over the years! (One in particular was more keenly interested in trying to convert his coworkers to his religion than actual work.)
The reason there aren't 10x engineers is, most engineering of sufficient scale or significance is done as a team, not as an individual.
My comment isn't sour grapes either. I rewrote a cryptography library in pure PHP, almost entirely on my own. I have an open source library for most security problems that the PHP ecosystem has managed to cook up, and I'm the sole contributor to most of them. People have called me a "10x engineer" before.
I reject the title, and you should too.
We can all accomplish more by working together than we can silo'd.
Build bridges, not walls. Gatekeeping and arrogance are both stupid.
I've seen whole chunks of big commercial operating systems that are basically written by one anti-social guy. And our lore is full of examples of individual contributors who weren't team players; often, they were one-man armies.
Tto my mind, _those_ are the 10x devs. They are the devs that your startup should hire...
... because otherwise if you hire the cogs that match this article's list, you are going to need 10x or 100x as many devs, and they'll probably only manage to make a mediocre shopping cart and nothing else works. But, look on the bright side, it'll be CIed up the whatsit and use all the latest cloud stuff and untested frameworks, so all is good on the resumes ;)
e.g. if you mentor 10x10x engineers are you automatically becoming a 100x engineer?
what about CTOs? I mean CTOs that have 100 100x engineers? Are the (Kilo|Mega)-Engineers?
I think I'm a 15x engineer, is it ok to put it on the resume?
But well.. I mean that, again, depends who you ask. If you ask a 100x engineer about 10x engineer, they will tell you that 10x engineer is just a 1x engineer (assuming there is a chamber and no exposure to the 0.01x engineers)
On the other hand, my grandma might qualify as a 0.01x engineer (she's good with her smartphone)
Maybe people want to be productive, because they want to be valued so highly that all their weaknesses will be overlooked.