[troughway]

I’ve been fortunate in my career thus far, since I was about 14 or so, to have always been in the company of at least one “10x”’er on each of my teams, as the cliche goes. They’re dispersed through various companies nowadays - Stripe, Twitch, Google, FB, Discord, etc etc. But it was interesting and beneficial for me to work alongside them if only because I had decent role models to follow.

This article first puts up a straw man and then switches gears halfway into a different subject. See if you can spot it.

There is no exaggeration. Some people are just far more in tune with the mental models required to do good software work at both a micro and macro level, that any time I see someone trying to play it down I have to ask if these individuals have worked with one of these precocious talented folks.

I also sometimes struggle to understand why anyone would write an article like this. You obviously want to hire the best you can for the best price you can. Anything else is a silly coping mechanism that you can’t face with honesty.

I want to read an article that’s straightforward about how much good work 10x’ers can do and how influential they can be for rest of the team. But this isn’t an article anyone would bother writing because they’re too busy making money to have dick measuring competitions on an online news board.

[logicslave]

I feel the same way, anyone who does not believe in the 10x engineer has just never met one. Sometimes the software they produce is absolutely stunning.

[BeetleB]

> I feel the same way, anyone who does not believe in the 10x engineer has just never met one.

Food for thought: The interpretation of a 10x engineer is not consistent. Putting my manager hat on, I ask: Can I replace 10 of my average engineers with this one person? The answer is never "yes".

That's because a team does more than just technical stuff. There's documentation, dealing with customers, bureaucratic stuff, etc. If you don't do these well, much of your brilliant engineering gains will go to waste. A brilliant engineer may be harder to replace than the average, but he/she is not a 10x engineer. Perhaps a 2x.

[fpig]

Producing an equivalent result in less time than a less capable engineer is not the main benefit of having some really good engineers, at least not at all companies. It's being able to perform work (and well) that requires more knowledge/ability. I know quite a few people who can't be replaced with 2 average engineers, but that's not because they work at a >2x faster pace, it's because I wouldn't trust an average engineer to do their job.

[username90]

> Can I replace 10 of my average engineers with this one person?

Yes you can in plenty of situations. 10 mediocre engineers creates a ball of mud and gets bogged down in technical debt. Beating that as a good engineer isn't hard at all. What you can't do however is tell a good engineer to maintain the ball of mud created by your 10 mediocre engineers.

[dragonwriter]

> Putting my manager hat on, I ask: Can I replace 10 of my average engineers with this one person? The answer is never "yes".

Well, yeah, people aren't interchangeable cogs. A person that is capable of delivering 10× value per unit of working time when properly employed probably isn't a drop in replacement for 10 1× developers. And managers thinking of people as interchangeable cogs where productivity multiples work by simple substitutions that way are great at getting ~sqrt(N)× (or less) output and quick burnout from N× (N > 1) developers.

> That's because a team does more than just technical stuff. There's documentation, dealing with customers, bureaucratic stuff, etc.

Yeah, and all of those things are things a developer can be better at than average, not just technical design and coding. Sure, there's some high productivity developed that are average or worse at some but much better at one area, there's also high productivity developers that are better than average across the board.

[BeetleB]

> A person that is capable of delivering 10× value per unit of working time when properly employed probably isn't a drop in replacement for 10 1× developers.

I find that claiming they produce 10x value per unit of working time, while also pointing out that they aren't interchangeable cogs, as a bit odd. If they are not interchangeable (which I agree they are not), then you shouldn't compare their productivity so glibly. At the very least, you need to state up front your method of valuation, which was why I said in my comment that "The interpretation of a 10x engineer is not consistent."

I've never found a manager, or even a company, that could put even a remotely accurate number to the value a tech employee is providing. In sales, perhaps. But with this kind of work, the error bar is large enough that any such estimate is useless.

And then confound that with the fact that the value of your work is dependent on other people - both in and out of your team. Being able to extract how much you produced from this mishmash is usually not possible.

So at best, your scenario of assuming someone is producing 10x value per unit of time is little more than an interesting thought experiment.

Lest "different people have different roles" is a confusing factor, let's eliminate the uncertainty. Say I have a team with many responsibilities (including non-technical ones), and it is every developer's responsibility to do these. You will likely never find a 10x employee there. You'll find someone who may be 10x better on the SW coding side, but he won't achieve those multipliers in his other responsibilities. His real value will be lower. In reality, managers will often shuffle roles so he is not hampered, and assign him to do only the thing he is great at, but that won't mean that he is producing 50% of the value in an 11 person team (which is what 10x means), when you look at the total output.

There's a reason why in game theory, if you need me to achieve something, I can demand half the value even if I only contribute 10% - because 50% is the stable solution (assuming you can't find an alternative to me, of course).[1] People who are replaceable get lower pay, but there's a reason almost no "10x" engineer gets 10x the pay. It's because they literally are not worth 10x to the company.

> Yeah, and all of those things are things a developer can be better at than average, not just technical design and coding

For sure - just not 10x. The reason I mentioned these other "bottlenecks" is that they don't scale as well as other technical/engineering work. And this is why most people viewed as 10x engineers aren't. To be clear, I don't doubt that a person is 10x better than the average in doing X, but I've found that X is always a very narrow scope. I want to see how much more he is contributing to the whole compared to others, and have yet to see a multiplier as high as 10x. If you cannot leverage your 10x productivity in X into 10x better documentation, 10x better promotion, 10x better testing, 10x better customer skills, then your productivity in X has those bottlenecks and your multiplier is less than 10x (in practice, rarely more than 2x for the "whole").

Of course, I work in a big company. I can believe 10x engineers exist, for short intervals, in a small company or a startup.

[1] Growing up, I really hated game theory, but too many decades on this Earth has shown me that the results largely reflect stable outcomes in society. I continue to hate it, but I don't ignore it any more.

[dragonwriter]

> Lest "different people have different roles" is a confusing factor, let's eliminate the uncertainty. Say I have a team with many responsibilities (including non-technical ones), and it is every developer's responsibility to do these. You will likely never find a 10x employee there.

Yes, if you're team is so poorly managed that has neither top-down not bottom-up organization for efficient task distrobution but instead features mechanistic, blind task distribution, you'll both decrease output even of a team of whatever overall competence and minimize the performance differences on the team that aren't do to absolute superiority on every type of task. Which is why, whether it's agile self-organizing teams or other bottom-up approaches on one side or any kind of top-down management theory on the other, every approach to managing work is about.

> To be clear, I don't doubt that a person is 10x better than the average in doing X, but I've found that X is always a very narrow scope

I find 10× in a narrow scope to be very rare, though it probably happens somewhere. Something more like 3× in a narrow scope of focus personal tasks (e.g., the more complex design and coding tasks) and providing a 2× multiplier on the rest of the team by helping choose efficient direction of focus, identifying problems proactively early, and otherwise keeping the team from wasted/misdirected work that otherwise would get done is both more common than 10× in a narrow field and a bigger productivity win.

[user5994461]

Honestly I don't know if there's any case where a team of 10 on a project would outperform a (good) engineer or two.

Half of the 10 engineers will do nothing, the other half will have different views of what to develop and will face off one another heading into opposite directions.

Usual development work in a company does not require 10+ workers and couldn't be split over 10 workers even if you had that many.

[JimDabell]

> Can I replace 10 of my average engineers with this one person? The answer is never "yes".

That’s because the “10x” is an order of magnitude difference between the best and the worst, not the average.

https://www.construx.com/blog/productivity-variations-among-...

[BeetleB]

Fair enough. In that case, I would expect a multiplier much larger than 10x. :-)

Definitely encountered folks who fail on FizzBuzz and similar problems.

[username90]

Note that the worst doesn't even finish so the difference is infinite. 10x is the difference between the fastest and slowest of those who could complete the project.

[naniwaduni]

Or, alternatively, the 0.1x engineer and the -10x engineer. (Or worse, the -10x PM.)

[totemandtoken]

As the joke goes, "There does exist a 10x engineer, but unfortunately it's in binary"

[nullsense]

Yeah. Engineers fall on a distribution. It's just that simple.

[gwright]

OK, now if it were only simple to figure out where on that distribution a particular engineer falls during the limited time of the hiring process.

[fctorial]

Can john carmack build 10 crud apps in a week?

[username90]

Pretty sure he could if he got to practice writing crud apps for a month beforehand and the apps were no more complicated than what a mediocre engineer can write in a week.

[Viliam1234]

Also, one engineer making 10 crud apps would probably share a lot of code between the apps. Which would allow him to make the new ones even faster. And the result would be easier to maintain.

If you instead hire 10 engineers to write 1 app each, you often end up with 10 apps using 8 different frameworks in 3 different languages. And then you will need 10 engineers to maintain them.