[t0astbread]

It doesn't matter whether 10x programmers exist. Programming is not a sport and as such, competition will only lead to narrow thinking, useless optimization and hatred. What we should really strive for is making programming a more creative activity where people learn from and inspire each other, not a competition.

Oh and also, "finding the 10x engineer" feels like a hotspot to inject hidden bias into recruiting.

[closeparen]

Communication overhead is expensive. All else being equal, it’s much better to build a small elite team that can operate successfully with less structure and process, rather than a large average one.

[t0astbread]

Right. But you can't build a functioning team that works together and can rely on each other by fostering a culture of competition and hiring only the "predestined" 10x engineers.

If the team culture is to help each other, forgive mistakes and learn from each other without measuring who's the best the team will automatically build itself without the need to hire only "10x engineers".

Or so I suppose. I'm not an HR person or anyone else with expertise in this field so you should take what I say with a grain of salt. I've just been thinking about this a lot as of late.

[closeparen]

Where I’ve seen teams with high concentrations of unusually smart people, they gelled and collaborated at least as well as anyone else. In fact the bandwidth and fidelity of their idea transfers is part of what made them impressive. It’s like they had their own little language to describe the codebase and what to do with it.

These were mature and soft-spoken people; might be different with brash young hotshots.

[t0astbread]

To me that sounds like an environment where there's not a lot of competition involved. (Which is what I was describing.)

[closeparen]

They were far and away the most selective team in the company.

I’ve seen this before in university too; competitive to get into can still be cooperative once in.

[t0astbread]

HN thread limit might cut this off but what if someone in that team starts experiencing problems and self-doubt? If everything in the team has always worked smoothly before they might not be able to handle it.

Additionally, elitist teams might scare off some people that could otherwise be great engineers if they just got a little entry help. Sure they can "get that elsewhere" but if every team behaved like that there's not only nowhere to enter, but there's also sort of an omnipresent assumption that you have to be good from the start in order to be able to achieve something in engineering.

I'm not saying your described team doesn't work but it's not exactly the kind of culture HR should be striving for in my opinion. (Albeit it's still far better than than a team that doesn't work at all or works against each other.)

[lonelappde]

Your dream team is great, missing only a 10x person to lead them, inventing MapReduce or MacOS or AWS.

[Bnshsysjab]

True, but if you culled the bottom 30-50% of programmers, how much productivity have you lost?

[t0astbread]

Probably a lot because now a lot of programmers up to maybe the top 10% or 20% are worried they're not good enough which will lead to a lot of stress and in turn, less productivity.

Aside from that, if all of programming is competitive it will keep a lot potentially very capable people from entering the field because not everyone (regardless of ability) is made for competition.