[throwaway0asd]

I have found the one distinction of 10x engineers is originality. They can write an original solution to a problem and be done. They don’t need a 1000 different tools to do their job for them, which has second and third order consequences.

That also means not having a petrified terror of failure.

Yes, there are 10x developers and this is measurable. It’s a progression of the Pareto Distribution. People scared shitless of originality, most people, cannot see this because their life goal is to crush it with internal processes.

[deltaonefour]

I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The solution is efficient and lacks unnecessary elements but it is not a novel solution.

There are literally two different aspects of intelligence: "lack of brain fog" and creativity. Both aspects of intelligence are different and being strong in one doesn't necessarily mean you're weaker in the other. Lacking brain fog does help with creativity, but creativity is still an independent pillar.

Creativity and originality is actually less evident so it's less recognized. 90% of the 10xers you see are just super sharp, and they likely only have average or slightly above average creativity. Someone who has high skill in originality is much harder to recognize and their solutions are so novel that many times the solutions are ridiculed, unrecognized and dismissed.

Two famous people who excelled in these different aspects of intelligence are Von Neumann and Einstien. To quote someone who knew them both:

"I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed.

But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jancsi's brilliance, he never produced anything as original."

[khazhoux]

> I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The solution is efficient and lacks unnecessary elements but it is not a novel solution.

I love this description and it matches my experience. Most people will both lose time with false-start approaches that are scrapped, and then with a sometimes endless series of commits at the end to patch up problems. The top engineers I've worked with (1-2 a decade) somehow just manage to avoid all that lost time.

[sinenomine]

> Most people will both lose time with false-start approaches that are scrapped

To a discerning eye this pattern looks like stronger minds implementing higher quality tree search[1], either through implementing higher quality neural search heuristics for tree pruning or via greater search depth.

Given relative NP-hardness of the problems[2] we are usually dealing with at our line of work and what we know about planning in machines and animals[3], it doesn't look immediately implausible.

With planning capability strong enough, one doesn't need trial and error in the real world for moderately complex problems: the plan devised through internal search is good enough to work on the first try. Weaker planners have to compensate by executing more rollouts and using the real world as a ground truth model.

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265

2. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejn.13851

[deltaonefour]

And also it implies lack of creativity.. Novel solutions lie in places that aren't part of the efficient search and can be filtered out by heuristics. Some solutions can only be found by random walk similar to biology and natural selection.

Your train of thought fits with my statement on how there are two pillars of intelligence. Creativity and "lack of brain fog"

[deltaonefour]

Wait till you meet someone who is creative. These people are even rarer, and their solutions to problems tend to be like holy shit how can someone even think in that direction??

The one I knew actually had hugely novel solutions but was forgetful and absent minded.

[arcanus]

Von Neumann and Einstein's contributions to humanity are incomparable to a 10x engineer. I don't think metrics such as productivity (which 10x crudely approximates) can begin to address this level of innovation. Both unquestionably drove paradigm shifts in scientific and mathematical thinking.

It's not measuring the same thing. A 10x engineer might be compared to a full tenured professor with a high citation count. Einstein and Neumann are luminaries of human thought.

[sinenomine]

> can begin to address this level of innovation.

... this level of innovation? Come on, there clearly is something more profound happening here:

> Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man"

> Seeing von Neumann's mind at work, Eugene Wigner wrote, "one had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch."

> Edward Teller admitted that he "never could keep up with him".[296] Teller also said "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."

Modern science has started to discern fundamental differences in neural architecture[1] and function[2] between very bright and moderately bright individuals. Surely there is a multitude of small differences, which, by virtue of adding up at the right side of the distribution's tail, bring forward a mind superior to ours.

1. https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/brains-o...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4052339/

[deltaonezero]

Yes they are at the top of their game, but you can certainly map differences from the top end of the spectrum to another part of the spectrum.

The difference between Von Neuman and a 10x engineer is vast. However the Delta between Einstien and Von neumann vs. the Delta between a 10x engineer and a regular engineer is a mappable concept.

You can do this with the "spectrum" of numbers too.

    |100010 - 1000000| = 10
    | 10 - 0 |         = 10

The delta is the same even though the first set of numbers is vastly larger then the second set. Maybe pretending those numbers are IQ points will help illustrate the concept better.

I would expect a 10x engineer to realize the above automatically without elaboration... jk.

[jollybean]

That's not the best way to describe it.

A 'Medical Researcher' can be less intelligent than a surgeon, but impact billions of lives.

A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time.

I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual.

A lot of crap startups, might have 10x engineers, but it may make no difference. Or 10x-ers caught up in Corporate Bureaucracy, same result.

So this whole mapping 'some project to revenues' really is something else, quite different. Maybe useful, but not in the context we are thinking here.

[arcanus]

> I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual

Disagree. My experience is that 10x engineers ARE inherently contextual. When we are talking about the cream of the crop, this requires evaluating impact.

You need the opportunity to thrive, which can be deeply contextual. Luck is an element of life. Napoleon would have been nothing without the French revolution. Einstein was fortunate (but capitalized!) that no one had put together Minkowski distance with open questions from michelson-morley.

> A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time

A brain surgeon can publish the results of a cutting edge surgery, which can save many more lives that a single hand wielding a scalpel. I don't think anyone here is arguing that surgeon's are evaluated on scalpel technique any more than we are comparing programmers by SLOC/day.

[jollybean]

Are you sure it's intelligence?

The great engineers I know have done it all before. They've worked on similar problems. They're not really breaking new territory.

I think this is where being 'prolific' matters.

Beethoven was a genius, but it makes no difference that he was smart if he didn't spend years and years just 'writing' music, transposing, experimenting etc..

That's the advice big composers give today i.e. 'you have to move quickly'.

If you were to watch someone build something, relatively quickly, you might be just amazed. But there is a lot of practice and trade-craft / craftmanship going on.

[deltaonezero]

Domain knowledge definitely is a factor. I guess you can call the people with domain knowledge 10x engineers, but there is a different class of engineers who have raw intelligence that make them a class well above those with only domain knowledge.

[jollybean]

I don't even mean domain knowledge so much as an intimacy with the stack, the tools ... and not even so much 'knowledge' but 'know-how'.

I work with a company that sells IP in the form of patents, but it's only 1/2 the value. You have to know how to use the components, and the resulting data and finesse it.

[deltaonefour]

That's what domain knowledge is. 'Know how.'

The engineers who are a class above the ones who rely on 'domain knowledge' aren't limited by the stack or the tools. They can switch to a different stack and the tools aren't so important to them.

For example I move faster on servers with ssh and tmux. I can do multiple things and configure stuff and test things really quickly with these tools.

A 10x engineer doesn't have patience learning about tmux and he doesn't need it.

In fact if you ever actually seen one of these guys (and they are rare) they actually tend to move slower with tooling. They just use the default terminal app on the Mac, they don't download iterm, tmux, neovim, vimplug or zsh to take their tooling to the next level.

[deltaonefour]

I would even go further to say because they are so efficient they lack the practice needed to get fast with tooling. Other engineers take a more brute force approach and thus as a result they get really familiar with the tools. 10x people don't have the opportunity to practice because they find the solution on their first try.

[varjag]

Quickly like, at 10x normal speed?