[ghaff]

I was unsure as well. Given this later tweet, all indications are that he was serious:

https://twitter.com/skirani/status/1150019060467240960?s=20

"I am surprised by extreme views on 10x engineers. They are great individual contributors. They may not be good with teamwork. So what? They can be phenomenal in the early stage of the product cycle.

Find the best in each & get the best out of them. That's what good managers do."

[cgiles]

What is wrong with what he said? I admit some parts were kind of silly, like the "worn out keys", but the overall theme was that he was basically just describing a somewhat romanticized version of a "Commando" from Atwood's "Commandos, Infantry, and Police". This is reinforced by his reply saying "They can be phenomenal in the early stage of the product cycle."

The overall picture is of someone who is technically competent but "moves fast and breaks things". The person who coined that phrase perfectly embodies the upsides and downsides of this type of person: Zuckerberg quickly threw together a PHP app, is a gigantic jerk, and he is a billionaire because his product was phenomenally successful. Then other, kinder, gentler and more team-oriented people came later to make the product performant and legible. If the team-oriented people had been involved from the beginning you would have gotten Google Plus.

It stands to reason that such a person would be more likely, on balance, to be abrasive and dislike meetings. I guess the only problem I see with his formulation is that a "10x" engineer is implied to be better than other engineers. Atwood's "you need all kinds" formulation is better.

[mikeash]

I completely disagree with this notion that there is this tension between being good at getting a project off the ground and being kind, gentle, and good at teamwork.

That’s what all this pushback over “10x engineers” is about. It’s not pushback against the notion that some people are really good at what they do. It’s against the notion that those people are necessarily asshole loners.

It’s a common broken syllogism that goes like, Zuck built Facebook into an empire with his bare hands, Zuck is an asshole, therefore Zuck was successful because he’s an asshole, therefore if we want to succeed we need to hire an asshole.

Alternately: our guy is an asshole but that’s ok because that’s what you get with a 10x engineer. We need that 10x so we need an asshole and therefore if you want them to stop being an asshole then you want this company to fail.

Alternately: there’s no excuse for being a jerk and people are tired of it being justified on the basis that it’s a necessary component of being great.

In my experience there is little correlation between programmer productivity as an individual and things like kindness and ability to work in a team. Plenty of geniuses are friendly people who work great with others. If you hire one of those for your early stage startup, you’ll not only do fine, but you’ll be in a much better position once you reach a point where you need a team.

[cgiles]

If the premise is that being a nice, team-oriented person and being a good programmer are not mutually exclusive, then of course I agree. And "Zuck was successful because he's an asshole" is something that seems like an obvious fallacy but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it isn't really. "Zuck was successful solely because he's an asshole" would be.

A distinction should be drawn between a "good programmer" and "person good at startups and greenfield projects". I would maintain that the latter requires a certain amount of assholery.

Really good products are not made by committee, at least not in the beginning stages. Committees and large groups of people also tend to slow things down, a lot. You have to be willing to be opinionated and self-assured to maintain a cohesive vision of where you want to go, and that necessarily means pissing people off. Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, and possibly Elon Musk are other examples.

So while 10xers in terms of pure programming skill will not be enriched in assholes, the famous ones will generally be, because they got in on the ground floor. The ground floor is where it helps to be an asshole. Most of us here are not dealing with such situations though, so I would agree to the extent that for 99% of employers in 99% of situations, considering assholery to be a positive trait is very unwise.

[mikeash]

You can be confident and self assured without being an asshole.

You mention Steve Jobs. What about Woz? Without Woz, Apple never would have gotten off the ground. I suspect most of us would agree that Woz is not only a 10x engineer, but probably a 100x. At least, he was in the early days of Apple, before the plane crash. And he’s a super nice fellow.

One thing being an asshole helps with is becoming famous. Everybody knows who Steve Jobs was. Approximately nobody outside the tech community knows about Woz. So naturally, if you go looking for examples, you’ll find lots of assholes. That doesn’t mean assholery correlates with (let alone causes) success.