[Jensson]

> Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent.

Right, the 10x engineer isn't benching 10x more than you or running 10x faster than you, nobody thinks that 10x engineer means 10x at every possible task.

[topkai22]

Nah, it's beyond that. I know a dev that is the most brilliant ux dev I've ever met. He can create beautiful, dynamic, understandable UIs literally 20x than I can.

However, he is just medeicore at must other tasks- constructing a common data model, scaling the backend or analyzing the data be is slower than I am, if he engages at all.

More recently I told my manager that I was intimated by how effective one of my coworkers was at his job (data science and BI.) He laughed and said my coworker basically thought the same of me (doing more standard software engineering.

Highly effective engineers are often only effective at limited aspects of the business of software engineering and it takes a good team structure of diverse talents to make everyone effective, even in the domain of software.

[Jensson]

That was my point, arguments such as yours are just arguing with strawmen. 10x is compared to another professional in the same domain. Saying that the engineer isn't as effective at another domain as a professional of that other domain is arguing with a strawman.

[Jetrel]

It's not really a strawman considering it's EXACTLY what most companies are trying to do: make programmers fungible across domains. Critically; they're doing this because they typically have no visibility into these skillsets from the managerial level, and they typically only have one or two programmers "in a given domain" on a team - even in a very, very large company. The company would like to pretend these people are fungible, and can be interchangeably swapped out, but the reality is they have no immediately replacements on the team.

There's no sense in doing an apples-to-apples comparison when you've only got one apple, an orange, and a pear.

[3grdlurker]

But then you have to ask what metrics are being used to define a 10x engineer. You’ll see that everyone has a different version of that and therefore whether a 10x engineer exists solely depends on the ontological argument for a 10x engineer. By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs.

[Jensson]

If you can replace an entire team of 10 engineers paid to work on something with a single engineer then that engineer is a 10x engineer, as long as the "10x engineer" didn't originally write the things they work with. That is my definition.

> By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs.

Replacing 10 salaries with 1 salary isn't subjective at all.

[3grdlurker]

Of course it is subjective. This is literally what you said:

> That is my definition.

You obviously care about optimizing for salary expenses. Most companies have room to hire more people who can do a few things well, so their definition of 10x would be different because they’ll have different expectations of their employees.

And really, if your definition of a 10xer is some poor fool who’s willing to take the job of 10 people for a single person’s salary, good luck finding someone who wants to spend their lives living that way.

[Jensson]

> And really, if your definition of a 10xer is some poor fool who’s willing to take the job of 10 people for a single person’s salary, good luck finding someone who wants to spend their lives living that way.

Right, they are paid more. The going rate for good people is around 1.5x up to 10x for exceptional cases.

Edit: And I am not talking about minimizing cost of salaries, I am talking about how much a good software engineer should demand. If he can replace 10 salaries with one then he has a lot of leverage he should use to get a higher salary, if the company isn't paying him then he should leave for a company that appreciates his skills. Plenty of companies pays premium money for premium talent.

[3grdlurker]

I mean, if all you’re saying is that “better programmers deserve better pay”, then you’re not exactly saying anything groundbreaking and the concept of “10xer” is not going to be necessary to make that point. It should also be noted that the salary that you get isn’t just a product of your talent but also of how well you sell yourself. Amongst many other factors, of course.

[Jensson]

Salary isn't just a factor of skill, but willingness to pay high salaries is the same as belief that skill matters a lot. A manager who doesn't believe in high developer skill variation will not pay significantly above market rate, while a manager with strong beliefs in skill variation will pay huge amounts for the right people. Therefore I see any arguments against 10x developers as an attempt to supress wages, likely managers who wants to hire good developers without paying them more than average developers, or developers who are jealous of others salaries. Luckily a lot of companies acknowledges that talent matters a lot and pays a lot for it, and today the highest valued companies in the world belongs to that group.

[mostertoaster]

So y’all don’t disagree with the main point.

There are some specific individual engineers who will get a specific individual task, faster than some other specific engineers.

If those same specific engineers get done many general tasks faster than another group of specific engineers on general tasks than they are just better in general. If some other specific task gets done by the other specific engineers better then it is just different domains.

Either way the individuals matter.

[3grdlurker]

So a fast programmer is necessarily better than one who takes a little more time but pushes out stabler code?

[mostertoaster]

Touché, same quality just one done twice as fast let’s say. Just a hypothetical.