It baffles me that anyone would want to tie the entirety of their self worth to their corporate career. Personally, no amount of extra effort has ever led to the reward I deemed suitable, so why work harder? The winners are the 0.75x - 1.5x engineers, those otherwise known as the Losers according to the Gervais Principle [1]
I always struggle sending that link to people, because only a certain kind of analytical brain can ignore the emotional weight of labels like "Sociopath" and "Loser" for 20k words. It is one of the most profound essays I've read about business. All models are wrong, but this one has been particularly useful to my career progression.
Apparently we needed to wait a decade to rename "Losers" as "Quiet Quitters."
There’s also the language of Michael O. Church, our fallen hero:
Losers: subordinate and strategic, not dedicated.
Clueless: subordinate and dedicated, not strategic.
Sociopaths: dedicated and strategic, not subordinate.
The unicorn of all three doesn’t exist because it’s never strategic to be both dedicated and subordinate: you always get better results if you pick one or the other and stay in that lane.
All of these models assume the following two things:
1. nobody likes their job
2. nobody thinks their work has any value besides what they are paid
In swe plenty of people like their job, everybody's paid like 200k now, and unless you're working on crud internal tools you get to work on something relatively important.
But yeah if you have a shit job then you can browse HN at work and philosophize about sociopaths and losers.
#1 is not assumed. Clueless like their jobs because they believe their roles (usually in middle management) are more important and respected than they actually are.
And, sure, SWE is full of Clueless (you don’t have to be a manager to be clueless) who think they’re going to be millionaire CEOs inside five years because they were promised “meritocracy”.
I do agree that those models are specific (and therefore limited) to the private-sector corporation, and don’t really hold in mission-focused organizations where there is an actual reason for it to exist. Thing is, most of the highest-paid tech jobs are in pointless work done solely for rich people, with zero or negative net social value, so that’s where most HN posters are going to end up.
Why does it have to be corporate? I would venture 10xers don’t necessarily care about who they work for, only that they’re putting out the best of their craft.
I just really like developing stuff. If my company went under, and there was a big software crunch that made it hard to get a job, I’d probably try my hand at being a professional photographer, but I’d probably spend my evenings writing code.
I don’t tie my self worth to my corporate career at all. I tie it to my ability to produce excellent software, but I’m just lucky I ended up born on a world in a time that values such a thing, because it’s what I love to do.
If I was concerned with my career, there’s probably much better things I could be doing with my time than becoming a better software developer. :P
There was either a blog response or just an HN comment in reply to the Gervais Principle that theorized there's another archetype, that of the Engineer who just cares about solving problems.
These internet pop sociological schemas are fun thought exercises but over-reductive.
I think the point (which I would agree with) is that someone that is that good, in a corporate environment, will be exploited in many cases and the parent doesn't understand why they let themselves be exploited and tie their self worth to it too. It's not like all of these people are literally rocket engineers and even the rocket engineers I would argue in many cases are being exploited.
You can be a great rocket engineer without giving up everything else, practically living at the office, not seeing your newborn kid because "parental leave isn't something Elon would believe in" etc. Be a rocket engineer that takes 6 months of paternity! Be a rocket engineer that works sane hours and comes home at the end of a work day. That cooks a great BBQ on the weekend with friends and family, not with other rocket engineers on the lawn at the office because you realized that you all went in to do some work.
I'm with the parent on this and like you I would probably code if I had a different job. I made my hobby my job but that means now I have other hobbies that are not coding. I give everything at work but I take my time very seriously. You're paying me for 40 nominal hours (yes we're not paid hourly, we're 'paid to do a job' but that definition is so wishy washy and ripe for abuse that I very literally apply the nominal hours) so I do my very best inside of 40 hours and will feel bad if I even think about doing something else within those hours. I.e. I won't "do the very minimum not to get fired". On the flip side of me giving my best during those hours and being present, I take this very seriously the other way around as well. Outside of actual emergencies, you better not expect me to answer, be online, do overtime or take abuse of the "this just came in, we need this by Monday" message on a Friday afternoon sort.
EDIT: for the down voters, I get it, I mentioned Elon, which on HN is bad. FWIW I know one of those guys and the newborn thing is real, not generic 'Elon hate'.
Those are the ones who update your repo without verifying it even compiles and then you have to have to investigate without any context when the CI pipeline yells at you because your integration tests are failing.
I'm anywhere from a 0.1x developer to a 10x developer, depending on circumstances. Talent comes and experience enters into it, although I think I'm far from the best at anything. The rest is just being allowed to actually get things done.
I've worked in teams that, as a whole, were significantly less productive than I am working alone, even though I was very much part of the team.
Not that any of the developers on the team was bad or anything. It's just we spent 20% of the time in meetings, 30% of the time debugging broken jenkins pipelines and kubernetes jobs, 10% of the time rolling back changes because stakeholders changed their mind, 25% of the time fixing the bugs introduced by rolling back the changes, 5% of the time having coffee and playing pingpong, 10% of the time agreeing on the design, 7% of the time in standups and other agile rigmarole, and the remaining 3% of the time developing the system.
The 10x developers are way more dangerous to the status-quo in an established company than the 0.1x developers. If your business-system is up and running don't change it. Milk the cow and then move on. That method worked for many years.
That seem easily true by looking at historical examples. But history isn't proof for future outcomes and dare I say our "age of tech" actively seems disprove all these historical truisms. Innovate or die kinda thing.
But, we are watching all this play out live, so who's to say. FWIW I am not betting that the old status-quo is meaningfully better.
I don't think the article is saying the don't exist. It's saying that they only exist within a specific context. They're 10x in one domain.
But it's also saying that what they're calling 10x could be a developer with a skill set that might not be possible for another developer to compete with, even if given infinite time.
That’s a good point, but domains can be broadly applicable. For example, I worked with two programmers who knew data structures and I/o to a great level. After they left my employer tried to replace them with teams and teams and couldn’t.
There are lots of companies that need data structures and I/o.
However, the idea that you can have more of the 10x devs is an illusion and wishful thinking. Mostly because it doesn't take into account the undeniable fact that the high performers aren't at their 100% all the time. It's also kind of physically impossible, too.
I think the 10x metric is productivity over a time period rather than peak performance. If I remember the original McKinsey report the idea is that one 10x will produce the same as 10 regular devs in a year.
I consider myself a 1x (or maybe .75x) and have periods of contemplation followed by periods of productivity within an hour or even a day. A 10x, I suppose, could operate in the same manner and so it’s certainly physically possible.
I’ve read interviews with John Carmack and he describes spending a few hours a day programming and almost a flow state.
Offtopic - I read Tom Demarco so long ago that I completely forgot that’s where 10x’er apparently comes from (maybe also JoS blog?). I find more and more that today’s eng managers haven’t read any of his books and was wondering if others noticed the same?
Good article, though I can't agree with the conclusion.
"Expert" doesn't really communicate much. There's a meme that's probably older than I am that goes something like:
"An expert is no different from the rest of us, he just has a binder and slides."
Today it would probably be a PowerPoint presentation, but the point stands: Expert has been an overused and overloaded term for far longer than 10x, and other than specifying a focus ("video encoding expert" or similar) it is insufficient to actually communicate to non-technical people the distinction.
Saying specialist is also descriptive of your focus, but similarly doesn't get to the underlying difference between and average and a 10x developer.
A video compression specialist is going to be really good at video compression, and maybe that's because they're really familiar with the math and the domain. And that means they could create compression algorithms much faster than I could; I don't know the technical details of any compression algorithms to the degree that I'd even consider taking such a job. Some tasks are best handled by experts or specialists; that's fine and appropriate.
But a generalist "10x" developer can typically handle many domains. In fact, jumping between domains is not uncommon. Their "expertise" is in being able to grok complex systems and multiple levels of indirection and interaction; what the systems are doing is less important. Maybe the video compression specialist is also a 10x developer, but just prefers to stay in the video compression space; that's fine. But I've seen code written by specialists were really good at their specialty, and their code worked...but it was not good code. And one hallmark of a 10x developer is that the code is good.
So both expert and specialist are really orthogonal to 10x.
10x is definitely not a good descriptor. Sometimes, having someone like this on a team is the difference between something being possible and something being impossible. In other words, you could hire 100x average devs and they will not be able to get the job done, but a single person like this may be able to.
There is a threshold one must cross which involves constructing neural connections across unexpected boundaries. Dipping your hands into many domains makes you below average in each domain to start, but after some amount of solving any problem without concern of specializing, they begin to solve each other. Techniques from one specialty apply to another. Bridges forms and possibilities materialize.
Within the possibility spaces of intersecting domains exists solution sets that can sometimes be exponentially more efficient.
People with access to that are hard to identify. They often do not have traditional backgrounds, get bored easily, have a disdain for hierarchy, and want equitable compensation relative to the possibilities they allow to be open — otherwise known as compensation in the neighborhood of c-level staff.
If you are someone with these abilities, know your value. You make or break a company. Do not allow yourself to give your abilities away while a sales or marketing person parasitically leaches off of you while making you feel small.
I made my early career on doing things that other developers claimed were impossible.
But we don't have another term that both has traction and isn't ridiculed.
"Rock star" and "ninja" are in the latter camp; both those terms and "miracle worker" seem like you're bragging.
But you're absolutely right. I know that there are some solutions I've come up with--quickly--that the rest of the team wouldn't have achieved given years. Your overall descriptions hits me too--non-traditional background, ADHD-level boredom sensitivity, always pushing for the right solution even if it's not politically wise, and demanding of high compensation.
But instead of changing the world I keep taking relatively brainless tasks just because they pay well. The boredom part makes it hard sometimes, but I usually get around that by changing the environment I'm working in so that any repetitive work gets eliminated.
> Today it would probably be a PowerPoint presentation, but the point stands: Expert has been an overused and overloaded term for far longer than 10x, and other than specifying a focus ("video encoding expert" or similar) it is insufficient to actually communicate to non-technical people the distinction.
This blend of highly dismissive comments on expertise and the volume of work it takes to achieve it is starting to become a cliche in software development circles, similar in tone to the denigrating comments regarding roles such as system architects.
Expertise is domain knowledge supported with real world experience. It's not fancy slideshows.
The video compression specialist outperforms you in every way because he's been studying the problem domain, researching the problem, implementing solutions, and analysing the results. And meanwhile you barely know what's a ffmpeg.
Some developers think too highly of themselves to the point they feel they can parachute into a problem and talk down anyone around them, including experts and specialists. And this shows in the code, and unfortunately in team dynamics.
> other than specifying a focus ("video encoding expert" or similar)
I am not making a dismissive comment here. I'm saying that expert is only useful for saying things like "video encoding expert".
And that a "video encoding expert" may be great in a very narrow way only involving the math surrounding video encoding, or may be a 10x developer in addition, but the "expert" label is orthogonal.
I'm certainly not going to pretend to be a video encoding expert in the sense of working on the encoding code at least. I've actually worked on projects that have used video encoding multiple times, and in that sense, yes, I did just "drop in and become an expert," in some cases learning ffmpeg on the fly and in other cases integrating C libraries and dealing with frame buffers.
And that is what a 10x developer can do. I don't feel the need to "talk down" to anyone, though, but if an expert makes a claim I will expect them to be able to talk intelligently about it and defend it if it seems wrong.
10X developers exist, and its painful for existing senior software engineers to welcome one on the team. They are also much rarer than people want to admit, and don't write software the way a "good senior engineer" does.
Mind elaborating on this? This is a fresh take for me. Are you saying a 10x dev writes code optimized for their own velocity, at the expense of accessibility/teamwork?
I consider myself above average and a key distinction is not wanting to build complexity. Microservices, k8s, fancy languages, or integration into things like Dynamica CRM are all generally mistakes unless you have a very good reason for doing so.
I also spent a lot of time optimising my workflow, which leverages build/test on change and large volumes of automations. Unit tests are also key.
I've had people on my team with these views and often their expectations need to be re-calibrated. They want to spend their time rewriting the codebase their way instead of being actually productive.
Those people are not 10x engineers, despite them sometimes thinking they are.
I think that re-engineering code based needs to be a calculated decisions, but i also think that there’s a large amount of resume driven development too.
There are places where there’s a need for k8s and similar, but largely that’s when you’re at google level scale. For the rest of us plebs, maybe leveraging simpler paas solutions or traditional mechanisms are more effective.
Except CRM. If you’re building in CRM you’re just making a mess, no matter what the rationale is.
Yes. Complexity is the root cause of many systemic issues in many projects I see. I see probably 2-3 medium applications every month. Either things are totally engineered or under-engineered (e.g., traditional php/aspx applications).
Anyone can be a 10x engineer, if you don't write any specs or go through planning, ignore architecture/deployment/monitoring best practices. And uses a language / framework/ tech stack that only they are familiar with.
Of course you'll royally screw over the rest of the company/team that has to productionalize, maintain your code + spaghetti of services after you leave.
That doesn't sound like a 10x developer at all, sounds like a bad developer that prioritizes dumping code, 10x developer would write docs, spend time planning the architecture and removing complexity from systems.
10x engineers definitely exist. There are 10x basketball players, 10x boxers, 10x guitarists. Why would there not be 10x programmers?
Further, if programming skill follows a normal distribution, the 10x programmer bucket is under 1% of the population. You, dear reader, are probably not a 10x programmer.
The true 10x programmers will not have 10x productivity in most giant tech companies. Google and friends have put in place mountains of progress in pursuit of downside protection (eg extensive testing, release barriers, and so on). Google invented Golang partly to address issues with mid level programmers being unable to code well.
These downside protections also blunt any benefit a 10x programmer could have, which is why so many people claim to have never seen them.
"A 100 mile run can take just 12 hours for the most elite runners and as long as 48 hours for the back of the pack racers. There are so many factors that can vary finishing times."
Maybe, just maybe, you are already a 5x runner. I certainly can't run any appreciable distance (which I am assuming here as running for just a few seconds isn't interesting) at speeds anywhere close to that... I am the running equivalent of the 0.1x programmer who is super excited by their Excel spreadsheet ;P.
This comparison is not good at all since you're only considering one metric, maybe he's a 10x runner because he has better technique, recovers faster, gets less tired, etc.
It's like comparing developers by how fast they can type.
Yes, this is why I thought the idea of "of course there are 10x developers because there are 10x [other categories]" was not a very useful statement. There are many dimensions to this assertion. In what way is a 10x developer 10x? And furthermore, could it be that there is one single dimension of a certain workflow in which a developer judged not to be 10x is simply fumbling in the dark, only able to work by random trial and error, while the 10x developer has a clear view of? Take two developers with equal aptitude with creating efficient algorithms, fluency in a certain language, facility with dev tools used in that role, etc, but one has no clue about networking concepts. Given a task that involves networking, one may well appear to be 10x the developer, when in fact their actually just an infinitely superior network administrator.
> Further, if programming skill follows a normal distribution, the 10x programmer bucket is under 1% of the population.
How does that follow? If someone on the 50th percentile takes X to do a job, someone on the 99th percentile might well take 49 hours. Someone who takes 5 hours to do the same job might be in the 0.0000001%, or not exist at all, or be in the 51st percentile.
In my experience those who implement before process leave out important cross team requirements and/or blow their political capital right away. Or they spend their time doing things like unsolicited refactors or migrations or rearchitecting. They're forgiven for a project or two but eventually people get tired of it because it's not sustatinable.
Those are not 10x engineers.
Real 10x engineers know how to deal with politics and process on top of the actual engineering. Those are rare but absolutely amazing to work with.
The whole '10x better' thing needs to chill out. Almost every time the phrase it used it's applied to something that can't even be accurately measured. "This product is 10x better" - okay, that's probably just your subjective opinion that you're dressing up as quantifiable fact. A small # of people are much better at their jobs than everyone else - this seems to be true - but it applies everywhere and it's not always '10x'. It might actually be that someone is twice as good or three times as productive, but we still slap a '10x' on the description.
Of course the article is right, but the initial Twitter thread that sparked the whole concept is beyond laughable.
> 10x engineers hate meetings. They think it is a waste of time, and obvious things are being discussed.
Engineers understand the value of meetings. This is the sign of a 0x engineer. It's the sign of a 10x code monkey. No legitimate business needs code monkeys.
The author is being overly semantic about a widely observed phenomenon in order to sling his devops. He's saying the phrase isn't good because a 10x developer given grunt work couldn't actually churn it at 10x speeds, but they're capable of doing complex work 95x+ faster than an average dev. It adds nothing to the discussion and is feel good drivel for insecure developers.
I've been "a 10x dev" several times, "a 1x dev" a lot of times and "a 0.1x dev" some amount of times.
Productivity is a complex function with many variables. I've also seen some super motivated and creative individuals barely tie their shoes and take a full minute to respond to basic questions on some days.
The "10x dev" is mostly a meme indeed. It absolutely does happen but it's not something you can just have more of.
The employers are free to keep dreaming of human robots though, if that helps them sleep better at night.
I don’t know that the scale is quite 10x but some engineers certainly have whole-number productivity multiples vs others. I could identify several of these folks at my workplace.
Also w.r.t. the points made about meetings, having gone from a large organization with many meetings to another large organization with few folks are definitely wasting time in meetings in some contexts and the best engineers at the first org would bias towards avoiding meetings.
While 10x developers certainly exist, the term often feels like the engineering equivalent to HR/recruiting's buzzphrase of "rockstar ninja developer." You know one when you see them, you want one on your team, but to talk about it too much in the hypothetical feels a little embarrassing, like woolgathering wish-fulfillment.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadI work at a Big Tech company so my $/hour ratio is pretty nuts.
Sorry for the useless comment :)
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Apparently we needed to wait a decade to rename "Losers" as "Quiet Quitters."
Sociopaths -> Opportunists
Clueless -> Idealists
Losers -> Pragmatists
Losers: subordinate and strategic, not dedicated.
Clueless: subordinate and dedicated, not strategic.
Sociopaths: dedicated and strategic, not subordinate.
The unicorn of all three doesn’t exist because it’s never strategic to be both dedicated and subordinate: you always get better results if you pick one or the other and stay in that lane.
1. nobody likes their job
2. nobody thinks their work has any value besides what they are paid
In swe plenty of people like their job, everybody's paid like 200k now, and unless you're working on crud internal tools you get to work on something relatively important.
But yeah if you have a shit job then you can browse HN at work and philosophize about sociopaths and losers.
And, sure, SWE is full of Clueless (you don’t have to be a manager to be clueless) who think they’re going to be millionaire CEOs inside five years because they were promised “meritocracy”.
I do agree that those models are specific (and therefore limited) to the private-sector corporation, and don’t really hold in mission-focused organizations where there is an actual reason for it to exist. Thing is, most of the highest-paid tech jobs are in pointless work done solely for rich people, with zero or negative net social value, so that’s where most HN posters are going to end up.
Sorry what companies/jobs are you talking about specifically?
I don’t tie my self worth to my corporate career at all. I tie it to my ability to produce excellent software, but I’m just lucky I ended up born on a world in a time that values such a thing, because it’s what I love to do.
If I was concerned with my career, there’s probably much better things I could be doing with my time than becoming a better software developer. :P
These internet pop sociological schemas are fun thought exercises but over-reductive.
You can be a great rocket engineer without giving up everything else, practically living at the office, not seeing your newborn kid because "parental leave isn't something Elon would believe in" etc. Be a rocket engineer that takes 6 months of paternity! Be a rocket engineer that works sane hours and comes home at the end of a work day. That cooks a great BBQ on the weekend with friends and family, not with other rocket engineers on the lawn at the office because you realized that you all went in to do some work.
I'm with the parent on this and like you I would probably code if I had a different job. I made my hobby my job but that means now I have other hobbies that are not coding. I give everything at work but I take my time very seriously. You're paying me for 40 nominal hours (yes we're not paid hourly, we're 'paid to do a job' but that definition is so wishy washy and ripe for abuse that I very literally apply the nominal hours) so I do my very best inside of 40 hours and will feel bad if I even think about doing something else within those hours. I.e. I won't "do the very minimum not to get fired". On the flip side of me giving my best during those hours and being present, I take this very seriously the other way around as well. Outside of actual emergencies, you better not expect me to answer, be online, do overtime or take abuse of the "this just came in, we need this by Monday" message on a Friday afternoon sort.
EDIT: for the down voters, I get it, I mentioned Elon, which on HN is bad. FWIW I know one of those guys and the newborn thing is real, not generic 'Elon hate'.
10x developer, 10x developer, 10x developer…
I've worked in teams that, as a whole, were significantly less productive than I am working alone, even though I was very much part of the team.
Not that any of the developers on the team was bad or anything. It's just we spent 20% of the time in meetings, 30% of the time debugging broken jenkins pipelines and kubernetes jobs, 10% of the time rolling back changes because stakeholders changed their mind, 25% of the time fixing the bugs introduced by rolling back the changes, 5% of the time having coffee and playing pingpong, 10% of the time agreeing on the design, 7% of the time in standups and other agile rigmarole, and the remaining 3% of the time developing the system.
It seems weird to deny they exist and to not seek them out for your organization.
But, we are watching all this play out live, so who's to say. FWIW I am not betting that the old status-quo is meaningfully better.
But it's also saying that what they're calling 10x could be a developer with a skill set that might not be possible for another developer to compete with, even if given infinite time.
There are lots of companies that need data structures and I/o.
However, the idea that you can have more of the 10x devs is an illusion and wishful thinking. Mostly because it doesn't take into account the undeniable fact that the high performers aren't at their 100% all the time. It's also kind of physically impossible, too.
I think the 10x metric is productivity over a time period rather than peak performance. If I remember the original McKinsey report the idea is that one 10x will produce the same as 10 regular devs in a year.
I consider myself a 1x (or maybe .75x) and have periods of contemplation followed by periods of productivity within an hour or even a day. A 10x, I suppose, could operate in the same manner and so it’s certainly physically possible.
I’ve read interviews with John Carmack and he describes spending a few hours a day programming and almost a flow state.
"Expert" doesn't really communicate much. There's a meme that's probably older than I am that goes something like:
"An expert is no different from the rest of us, he just has a binder and slides."
Today it would probably be a PowerPoint presentation, but the point stands: Expert has been an overused and overloaded term for far longer than 10x, and other than specifying a focus ("video encoding expert" or similar) it is insufficient to actually communicate to non-technical people the distinction.
Saying specialist is also descriptive of your focus, but similarly doesn't get to the underlying difference between and average and a 10x developer.
A video compression specialist is going to be really good at video compression, and maybe that's because they're really familiar with the math and the domain. And that means they could create compression algorithms much faster than I could; I don't know the technical details of any compression algorithms to the degree that I'd even consider taking such a job. Some tasks are best handled by experts or specialists; that's fine and appropriate.
But a generalist "10x" developer can typically handle many domains. In fact, jumping between domains is not uncommon. Their "expertise" is in being able to grok complex systems and multiple levels of indirection and interaction; what the systems are doing is less important. Maybe the video compression specialist is also a 10x developer, but just prefers to stay in the video compression space; that's fine. But I've seen code written by specialists were really good at their specialty, and their code worked...but it was not good code. And one hallmark of a 10x developer is that the code is good.
So both expert and specialist are really orthogonal to 10x.
But we don't have another term that both has traction and isn't ridiculed.
"Rock star" and "ninja" are in the latter camp; both those terms and "miracle worker" seem like you're bragging.
But you're absolutely right. I know that there are some solutions I've come up with--quickly--that the rest of the team wouldn't have achieved given years. Your overall descriptions hits me too--non-traditional background, ADHD-level boredom sensitivity, always pushing for the right solution even if it's not politically wise, and demanding of high compensation.
But instead of changing the world I keep taking relatively brainless tasks just because they pay well. The boredom part makes it hard sometimes, but I usually get around that by changing the environment I'm working in so that any repetitive work gets eliminated.
This blend of highly dismissive comments on expertise and the volume of work it takes to achieve it is starting to become a cliche in software development circles, similar in tone to the denigrating comments regarding roles such as system architects.
Expertise is domain knowledge supported with real world experience. It's not fancy slideshows.
The video compression specialist outperforms you in every way because he's been studying the problem domain, researching the problem, implementing solutions, and analysing the results. And meanwhile you barely know what's a ffmpeg.
Some developers think too highly of themselves to the point they feel they can parachute into a problem and talk down anyone around them, including experts and specialists. And this shows in the code, and unfortunately in team dynamics.
I am not making a dismissive comment here. I'm saying that expert is only useful for saying things like "video encoding expert".
And that a "video encoding expert" may be great in a very narrow way only involving the math surrounding video encoding, or may be a 10x developer in addition, but the "expert" label is orthogonal.
I'm certainly not going to pretend to be a video encoding expert in the sense of working on the encoding code at least. I've actually worked on projects that have used video encoding multiple times, and in that sense, yes, I did just "drop in and become an expert," in some cases learning ffmpeg on the fly and in other cases integrating C libraries and dealing with frame buffers.
And that is what a 10x developer can do. I don't feel the need to "talk down" to anyone, though, but if an expert makes a claim I will expect them to be able to talk intelligently about it and defend it if it seems wrong.
I also spent a lot of time optimising my workflow, which leverages build/test on change and large volumes of automations. Unit tests are also key.
Those people are not 10x engineers, despite them sometimes thinking they are.
(Not saying that's you, I don't know you).
There are places where there’s a need for k8s and similar, but largely that’s when you’re at google level scale. For the rest of us plebs, maybe leveraging simpler paas solutions or traditional mechanisms are more effective.
Except CRM. If you’re building in CRM you’re just making a mess, no matter what the rationale is.
Of course you'll royally screw over the rest of the company/team that has to productionalize, maintain your code + spaghetti of services after you leave.
Further, if programming skill follows a normal distribution, the 10x programmer bucket is under 1% of the population. You, dear reader, are probably not a 10x programmer.
The true 10x programmers will not have 10x productivity in most giant tech companies. Google and friends have put in place mountains of progress in pursuit of downside protection (eg extensive testing, release barriers, and so on). Google invented Golang partly to address issues with mid level programmers being unable to code well.
These downside protections also blunt any benefit a 10x programmer could have, which is why so many people claim to have never seen them.
There are 4X runners I guess.
It's like comparing developers by how fast they can type.
How does that follow? If someone on the 50th percentile takes X to do a job, someone on the 99th percentile might well take 49 hours. Someone who takes 5 hours to do the same job might be in the 0.0000001%, or not exist at all, or be in the 51st percentile.
Huh? Why would that be?
Those are not 10x engineers.
Real 10x engineers know how to deal with politics and process on top of the actual engineering. Those are rare but absolutely amazing to work with.
In their own ways, they are similar to people who speak 10 different languages and who can also take to a new language like a fish gliding in water.
> 10x engineers hate meetings. They think it is a waste of time, and obvious things are being discussed.
Engineers understand the value of meetings. This is the sign of a 0x engineer. It's the sign of a 10x code monkey. No legitimate business needs code monkeys.
https://1x.engineer/
Productivity is a complex function with many variables. I've also seen some super motivated and creative individuals barely tie their shoes and take a full minute to respond to basic questions on some days.
The "10x dev" is mostly a meme indeed. It absolutely does happen but it's not something you can just have more of.
The employers are free to keep dreaming of human robots though, if that helps them sleep better at night.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also w.r.t. the points made about meetings, having gone from a large organization with many meetings to another large organization with few folks are definitely wasting time in meetings in some contexts and the best engineers at the first org would bias towards avoiding meetings.