[johansch]

During the past 19 years in software I have had the pleasure of working closely with five different 10x engineers.

None of them have been assholes - the opposite actually - once you've gotten to know them. If I were to generalize: most of them are not particularly extroverted, so that may be a cause of misunderstanding.

Some of the 3-5x engineers (they also exist!) have a tendency to treat people as "idiots" until they have proven themselves worthy intellectually/engineering-wise.

[50CNT]

That might be a social dynamic thing. Think of how say high school dynamics work. It's never the most popular person that puts others down (it doesn't do them any good), it's the kids that are popular, but not quite.

I would not be surprised if this also held true for engineers. 10x engineers already distinguish themselves through their work output. It's the 3-5x engineers that are good enough to tell themselves that they produce more than your vanilla engineer, but not good enough that they couldn't get lumped up with them. It's that uncertainty that produces viciousness in the attempt to remove yourself from that set.

Unless your show them that your are a "3+x engineer", they'll try to distance themselves from you to not be tainted by association. I guess it also follows that they will be the ones obsessed with 10+x engineers.

Kings aren't vicious, it's their courts that are.

[existencebox]

Of all the observations of social dynamics in this thread; this one was so on point that I had to follow up with some sort of affirmation; it's a good point to think about and to watch for in people, whether that's yourself (and I've certainly had to) or your people as a manager, due to the symptoms this situation can breed.

To provide some context for while I feel this is important, when I first moved into BigCO, there was a period of reorgs in my org entirely out of the control of anyone not in "the powers that be". As such; there was a "generation" of new engineers brought in as juniors who were laterally moved multiple times in a few years. New engineers continued to be brought in, but due to the promotion structure of the org, a lateral transition essentially "resets" you, so new grads were coming in at the same level of people who had been delivering for years.

Now; there's another discussion if this relates to the "3x engineer" thing, which I wasn't even going to get into, but for practical purposes these engineers WEREon average performing multiple X better simply by nature of domain experience and rampup. This resulted in different symptoms from different people; the more zen of my peers simply got saddened about feeling looked over for promotions and started considering other options. Many left for other companies. The less zen (myself included) got more "fierce" as a sister post elsewhere put it, realizing that to "catch up" with the career track, high visibility, high impact projects were needed, and that required pushing harder.

To bring some sort of conclusion out of this rambling mess; I'm not sure your statement of "vicious" is the right word, but needing to stand out from that set seems to be an inevitable consequence of how many promotion structures are built, and being aware of this dynamic, engineers can be both better at their job by staying on top of their internal responses and keeping them productive (why I differentiate "fierce" and "vicious"; you can have the former without the latter I think), and Managers can better stay on top of their team dynamic and keep employees happy by realizing these emotions happen, since I find it's an oft under-appreciated dynamic.

Man that ended up being FAR more of an essay than I intended. Hope there was at least one well expressed thought in there.