[icheishvili]

It's widely accepted that olympic swimmers are more talented a person you'd randomly find at your community pool, but for some reason there's strong resistance to the idea that across a large distribution of software engineers, some outliers may indeed be much more productive than the mean.

[jimbokun]

Of course there are far more productive engineers, but this man, while good at his job, and the description of a "10x" engineer in the cited twitter thread, are nothing like actual 10x engineers.

The ultimate "10x" engineer, to me, is Peter Norvig. (Maybe a 100x engineer?)

For fun, he knocks out a spell checker on a plane ride:

https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

In very concise, well documented, easy to read and understand code, with good performance.

This isn't because Peter doesn't have to look at documentation or has a black desktop background. It's because he can look at a problem and come up with elegant and creative solutions other engineers wouldn't even think of.

[4ntonius8lock]

Thank you for explaining so succinctly what a 10x engineer is. In fact, that's a 10x for many professions that lend to high creativity and experience.

This out of the way reply to a comment on a post that's a reply to a twitter storm.

This here, this is a major issue I have with 'news'. We are many times busy discussing crap, which is well defined and easy to understand. But the mundane, easy explanation fails to be bait worthy.

Instead what gets picked up is the most extreme, strident and far out explanations. And these seem to dominate public commentary.

jimbokun summarized what a 10x engineer is, in an off hand comment, better than all the fuss that started his comment.

[vonmoltke]

"[A] large distribution of software engineers" is a group that has already been, to some degree, filtered by aptitude and interest. "[A] person you'd randomly find at your community pool" is essentially the same as randomly drawing a person from the population at large.

Also, "more talented" is a much milder statement than "much more productive", which in turn is a much milder statement than "10x". (The first two, as well, are not saying the same thing. Talent != productivity.) Nobody disputes that there is a distribution of talent or productivity among software engineers. People dispute the magnitude of the standard deviation of that distribution.

Going to your Olympic swimmer example, the number of people who qualify for the Olympics in swimming is a small portion of those who try out, which in turn is a small portion of those who are involved in competitive swimming at all levels. Thus, the number of Olympic-level swimmers relative to the overall swimming talent pool is tiny. I don't think anyone disputes that there are a few dozen, maybe even several dozen, people who are several standard deviations better than the average software engineer. What they dispute is that there are companies full of them, or that trying to hire them is a viable strategy.

[louhike]

I don't think it's fair to compare random people in a community pool (even though some can be really good) with engineers with work experience.

[ceejayoz]

Is Michael Phelps ten times faster than your average competitive swimmer, though?

[Wald76]

No but he wins 10 times more often.

[ceejayoz]

A software development team probably shouldn't be a "one person wins, everyone else loses" scenario, though.

[tonyarkles]

The ideal "10x engineer" in my mind is one that helps their team win significantly more often. Competitive swimming is maybe not the best analogy (although I have worked with engineers like that before too). If you want sports, maybe basketball. You've got a good team, but you've got a stellar player that makes them all better.

[chrisan]

well to simplify it: if 2 competing companies with 1 programmer each were trying to create $popular_app_or_website then the company with the more productive developer would "win" more often

[onefuncman]

no, businesses win or lose based on sales & marketing, not how productive their engineers are.

[zip1234]

Does Michael Phelps deliver 10x more value than the slowest guy on the US team? The multiplier is for value to the organization.

[bluedino]

Switch Michael Phelps with Tom Brady.

[yowlingcat]

Okay, but one of these is a massively distributed team and organizational sport, and one of these is an individual sport. One is highly based on hyper-focused physical dexterity and the other is an interdisciplinary form of cooperative knowledge labor to achieve business goals. There's some overlap in so far as technique exists in both, but there exist such vast differences between the failure, passing, and mastery criterion, the process of learning and teaching, and even the actual act of execution that the analogy doesn't really work effectively as a vehicle of language.

This isn't to say I fully disagree with your point, by the way. I'd rather use the analogy of a TV producer, or a movie production, or a band. It's creative output, there's tons of variation in the level of natural and practiced talent, it's highly team based, and the work product is very much a knowledge product. But, even there, differences remain between something you have to use and something you can consume for pleasure.

How about industrial design firms and elite designers? Well, now we're cooking with gas -- when it comes down to it, engineers are still ultimately designing systems that either are dependencies of other systems that people directly use, or are those systems themselves. What makes someone 10x more productive? Is it that they individually produce 10x more output, or that they understand the nuances of the constraints 10x better, or that they're able to make the engineering lifecycle 10x more effective, or some combination of all of the above? I'd say the latter. In that way, there are almost certainly outliers that are more productive than the mean.

And, in my experience, that comes from a combination of individual competence and team/organizational based leadership ability. It's a far cry from the savant 10x individual contributor that the 10x meme originally came from and which many folks across the industry now (rightfully, in my opinion) critique.

I've been a "10x engineer" and I'm not sorry. The difference is, it's not the 10x savant individual contributor. I've made entire organizations 10x more effective, but fundamentally, that was because I learned how to be a good multiplier: how to help people out, help them grow, unblock procedural bottlenecks in a lasting way, resolve misalignment between different divisions in an org, refine a product that was missing the forest for the trees, and so many other things. But that did not come from me being some kind of natural genius, or more "talented" -- it came from me being persistent, and never really being satisfied if I thought things could be improved. It came from me doing that over a long enough period of time that my cumulative output and multipliers ended up indeed 10x-ing things. This is the kind of "10x" engineer that I believe most engineers can become -- not easily, but doably. I've built teams and orgs consisting of these kinds of engineers. And, they'll eat your 10x savant contributors for breakfast.

How does the old saying go? Culture eats strategy for breakfast? It seems trite, but it's always rung true in my experience.

[cgiles]

> I learned how to be a good multiplier: how to help people out, help them grow, unblock procedural bottlenecks in a lasting way...

So, here you perfectly describe a 10x middle manager. Or just a "good" middle manager, because I agree this 10x business is kind of silly.

I will never understand why people take all these soft skills unrelated to programming and say they are more important to a programmer than skill at programming. It's not that these skills are undesirable. It's just that, to continue the sports analogies, it is like saying that it is more important for a basketball player to be fast and be a good team player rather than be skilled at shooting and blocking.

If anything it is the other way around, people with good soft skills and bad technical skills are an absolute menace and plague if they try to get involved in anything technical. They have no idea how much they screw up everything they touch.

If you aren't a programmer, and you're a manager of programmers, then fine. A coach needs a totally different skillset than a player and you can be a fine coach even if you are a mediocre player.

[yowlingcat]

EDIT: Have you worked in the industry as an engineer? The following is drawn upon my combined experience as an engineer and as a leader.

Who said I was a manager as I was developing and applying these skills? I was doing this as I was still top of the pack as an engineer. I will never understand why people take all these soft skills that are completely required to do the job of engineering and say they are not part of the job of engineering. What is it with the sports analogies? They're fundamentally inappropriate and imply a deeply reductive conception of the craft of software engineering. You're doing something with a goal far more complicated than "the team with the most points wins".

Moreover, you're drawing a false dichotomy. People with the technical skills to really be highly productive engineers always have the soft skills too. They are both required to sustain high productivity.

But please, don't tell me I'm not a programmer. I'm an excellent engineer, and I've always been near or at the top as an IC. But, that's not in spite of my soft skills. It's because the two create a feedback loop that helped me level up and run things more effectively than engineers that overspecialized on one or the other. And again, the best ones I've worked with have been the same.

If you've seen such engineers, then that's one thing. But if you haven't, implying that you even need to choose, or that the best engineers don't have both -- it's specious. It's something you think must be the case because you don't have a more exhaustive set of data and experiences to draw from. And that's okay! But then, one would hope you'd at least be curious about it rather than dismissing it.

These engineers are not unicorns or mythical creatures. They're competent professionals that take every part of their job seriously. They're the kind I prefer to work alongside and hire.