[crazygringo]

There's another reason, too -- which is that a "50x engineer" will very rarely be 50x on most development tasks.

Your 50x engineer may be able to build a highly performant and complex algorithm by themselves, truly in a week where other engineers might take a year.

But 99% of programming isn't that. It's CRUD apps and configuration files and debugging browser quirks and hunting down race conditions etc.

Your "50x engineer" probably isn't going to be all that faster solving a CSS bug or putting together an online order form or configuring Apache.

So even if companies could identify programming geniuses... they mostly don't have genius-level work to give them, so there's no use in paying 50x anyways.

[Trasmatta]

In my mind and experience, a "10x engineer" (not sure I'm ready for the "50x" term) gets (or should get) that distinction because they write high quality, fault tolerant, secure, performant, well documented code, AND they empower their teammates. It usually has very little to do with the speed in which they accomplish all of that, which I think is why management has a hard time identifying who they are.

They may think the engineer who fixes 10 bugs a week is their best asset. But what about the engineer who quietly created high quality code with very few bugs, that's extremely easy to maintain?

A "10x engineer" gets that distinction because their software provides dividends in quality and maintainability for years and years, even if the initial implementation took them a seemingly long time. But management often just sees the engineer who's closing the tickets the fastest, even if that person's code becomes a curse on the company for years to come.

It doesn't help that so many teams are focused on 2 week sprints and quarterly goals. That kind of work favors a certain type of engineer, and incentives short term solutions.

[crazygringo]

I appreciate what you're saying... but I don't think that's the generally accepted meaning of 10x. You're just describing a good, responsible, effective programmer. Skills like good documentation or secure code are things anyone can learn from training and experience. And the qualities you're describing are also very much a function of what the company requires/expects/incentivizes, rather than what any individual chooses to do.

People generally reserve "10x engineer" who really do have the intellectual capacity and stamina to crank out 10x the amount of code of the same quality as a median engineer.

I think it's important not to confuse the two.

[Trasmatta]

I'm pretty dubious about the idea that this type of engineer actually exists.

[crazygringo]

They definitely do, I've worked with them.

As far as I can tell, it's mainly the ability to hold a lot more "connections" in their head at any one time, and extreme logical rigor.

So that instead of reasoning about just the function they're writing, they're always naturally reasoning about the entire framework it fits into, and so they don't tend to produce bugs where the function doesn't fit in right, where it has weird side effects, where it duplicates code elsewhere, where it will create unforeseen technical debt, etc.

And then their logic is just watertight, always. They don't make all the kinds of basic design and logic errors other programmers tend to repeatedly make.

They sit down, crank out 1,000 lines in a couple of hours, try to compile/run, fix bugs around mismatched braces and misspelled variables, and it just works.

In contrast with someone else who takes a couple days to get it even kind of working, then winds up having to rewrite large parts of it twice because they'd made basic design errors in the first place.

But I still stand by my original point that most programming jobs don't require you to write a tight 1,000 lines often. Most work is plumbing, bugfixes, CRUD, etc. where the connections/logic skills don't really pay off in a big way.

[alkonaut]

There’s a bit of Amdahls law here: If I’m “10x engineer” but just 10% of the day, that means I’m really a 1.1x engineer. And it doesn’t matter (much) whether I’m a 50x or 100x engineer in that 10% the max speedup is limited by the “1x” part.

[knowtheworld]

I agree that 10 engineers can’t do everything 10x. Even 10x engineers can only let 10% of the code 10x faster, it might have a deciding impact on the end result. if a software product is all written by 10x engineers, it might turn out to be 2x as fast as the one done by average engineers.

And in software optimization, speeding up a program 2x usually requires 10x more resources. This is why I think the 10x concept still makes sense here.

[benreesman]

Without remarking on the whole 50x thing, I do think it’s worth pointing out that lots of software people don’t work on web development or CRUD apps very often.

[knowtheworld]

This is an interesting point! I do agree with you that "they mostly don't have genius-level work to give them" is one of the reasons why this happens.