[lostdog]

Yeah, there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment.

But I have worked with a few people who were clear 10x engineers. Everything they worked on they did better and faster and cleaner. They could often solve problems that other skilled people couldn't even get started on. Yes, they usually picked important and impactful things to work on, but even when just assigned tasks from the grab bag of team tasks, they were still 10x faster.

Somehow these individuals were also 10x nicer too.

The only downside of working with them is going home and looking in the mirror and wondering why you can't match their pace. Oh well, I would trade the hit to my ego for getting to work in their codebase any day of the week.

[psyc]

So have I. And that’s why this tiresome perennial argument will never die. You’ve either worked with one and seen fit to give them due credit, or only the first, or neither. And yes the ones I’ve worked with have also been helpful, humble, and kind.

[dilyevsky]

> there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment.

Isn’t that just really obvious truism that someone who is hyper specialized and really good in one area say video codecs is probably not a 10x’er in frontend dev? Doesn’t make it fake, still a jackpot as far as employers and probably coworkers are concerned. Unless you’re someone like like Fabrice Bellard but he’s more like a 1000x’er so probably still be better than most at anything programming related

[stingraycharles]

I think what the parent meant was that “true” 10x engineers can apply their skills to a wide variety of problems, and it isn’t just applicable to a narrow problem domain and/or for a very short period. This makes clear he isn’t talking someone who just happens to be specialized in a specific codebase or one specific problem, for example.

[dilyevsky]

Most companies won’t have structure to accommodate such generalists anyway so they will get pissed or bored and quit so you probably should look for “fake” ones then.

[Brian_K_White]

Perhaps they are consultants who gig hop?

[readme]

i think the major advantage is much more rooted in general problem solving ability

familiarity might be able to give you 1-2x edge but 10x+ comes from raw problem solving skill and research aptitude

[varjag]

From the ones I've witnessed it's pure focus and endurance.

They are intelligent but so are many of their less impressive peers. They do have problem solving skills but most developers develop the same problem solving vocabulary after few years. They however don't chit chat much when they work, don't wander away to unrelated activities (like hanging out over here in worktime) and if disrupted recover their focus quickly.

[drBonkers]

How do you build this raw, generically-applicable problem solving skill? Everything I come across ends up being frameworks for probables specific to a discipline.

[mmmm2]

I think it can come from natural curiosity, strong fundamentals, and experience. Search for problems that don't have canned answers and try to solve them.

I think anyone can improve if they're willing to put in the time, though of course natural ability does help.

Think about learning to write a compiler for a programming language. You'd have to learn: - Computer architecture - Assembly language - Caching - Recursion and Parsing - Type theory - Translations - Performance testing

Or attempt to write your own database. That would cover at least: - File Systems - Transaction semantics - Algorithms

I think tackling problems like this would help a great deal. Or just look for areas where you don't know how to do something, and work on them.

Things like: - How deeply do you know your favorite programming language? - How easily can you setup a Linux server to host a web application? - Are you an expert at your editor? - Can you write a usable GUI, either for the web or a phone, etc.

[drBonkers]

These are great example exercises, thank you for sharing them.

I think they may get at the heart of what I was trying to say though: while these clearly would make one better at solving software engineering problems, I'm not certain they would improve one's raw, general problem solving ability in an orthogonal discipline.

Some (likely imperfect) examples are:

- solving salary negotiation of a job/contract offer

- solving socio-political organizational problems in a company

[ethanwillis]

Not everything is acquirable.

[astrange]

Fabrice certainly is good but most of what people think he did in video codecs was mostly Michael Niedermayer, who is that good, but I don't think you'd also want to be a schizophrenic Austrian who can't leave his house.

[glimshe]

Some people are just smarter than others - much smarter. These engineers have their brains wired differently, helping them be more suited to programming/design work. If we accept the existence of 10x chess players (state champions) and 1000x chess players (grandmasters), why not 10x engineers?

I personally worked with (and managed) amazing engineers that are AT LEAST 10x more productive than the worst AND average engineers.

Assuming that they are toxic or hard to work with is something people say to feel "the same when all is taken into account". That's not the case, a lot of these great engineers are great people too making them objectively a lot better than the average engineer.

[here4funzies]

I'm 10X if I do everything by hand with only efficient and natively supported abstractions. If you ask me to use the latest trendy framework, I go back to 1x or 0.5X.

[deltaonefour]

My experience rings true with this. They are very few. In a single organization you may not ever meet one.

Another thing that sort of matches your experience is that they are 10x nicer. 10x engineers don't show off at all. They don't need to. What I've been finding is that engineers that think they're smart are probably smart, but they are NEVER 10xers.

[mbrodersen]

Yep my experience as well. I have worked with 10x developers that will quickly outperform any other developers in any area they start working on. I worked with a 10x that started with zero knowledge on a specific programming language and it’s ecosystem and in a few months delivered a well written, easy to maintain large business applications that a whole team of more experienced developers (in that language/ecosystem) had failed to deliver. Developing software is like any other activity. Some people simply are more talented than others. People who refuse to acknowledge this needs to explain why software development is the only activity where talent doesn’t matter. They can’t.

[908B64B197]

I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. So much so that it actually created friction with the rest of the dev team go figure.

Next summer they tried to get him back but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. Of course, he wouldn't return. That's when they realized a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to them; they lucked out hiring him that summer but there was no chance they could attract someone like him full time.

[300bps]

There are main personality traits that are associated with being not nice:

1. Being a know-it-all

2. Unwilling to admit mistakes

3. Not collaborative

4. Not sharing knowledge

5. Unwilling to be coached

There are many more. These “not nice” traits are the same ones that will lead to stunting your growth as a software engineer.

[BlargMcLarg]

Except people are incredibly bad judges of character. Naming the traits is the easiest part. Realizing these traits aren't binary and not as easy to judge in the open as they are in a vacuum, not so much. Meanwhile, the people in charge are all to eager to pass "not a team player" judgments over something far more complex than "not nice".

This also needs a fair reminder, people suck at communicating.

[sinenomine]

> The only downside of working with them is going home and looking in the mirror and wondering why you can't match their pace.

One could imagine a society expending not insignificant proportion of GDP on R&D towards human cognitive enhancement. Same society could allow anyone to volunteer for the corresponding enhancement programs.

If one starts to ponder why we don't live in such a society, one is led to reconsider major incentives governing our public sphere and key institutions.

I don't think in the end there is a rational excuse for obvious lack of government-led or private-funded research into nootropics, neurophysiology of exceptionally bright individuals, and non-therapeutic gene therapy. The amount of research done so far is laughable, compared to obvious transformative impact in case of a breakthrough. As a "tech worker" and as a taxpayer I have to admit that the current nexus of large-scale sociopolitical trends is aggressively coercing me to spend my individual and very limited peak of energy, competence, intelligence and willpower towards advancing mostly deadbeat goals of the attention economy.

The small (in absolute terms) fundamental physical difference between the best and merely good enough should not be an insurmountable abyss we take it for.

I don't want to be a 2x engineer for your corporate monstrosity or yet another fast-growing CRUD app. I want to be a 2x engineer putting in meaningful work towards implementing the timeline where anyone, myself included, could become a 10x or a 100x engineer by undergoing affordable and safe gene therapy.

[astrange]

I think you might have overdosed on the fancy personal optimization literature and skipped the basics. Having a bigger brain metaphorically doesn't necessarily lead to productivity so much as increased ability to delude yourself.

The basics for being productive are 1. be in good shape (sleep and exercise) 2. not having to do less important stuff (someone cooks for you) 3. not having any more important stuff to do (no side business, spouse and kids don't demand more of your time).

Similarly, the best way to get moderately wealthy isn't to make a lot of complicated investments, it's to marry someone else who works and buy a house together.

[sinenomine]

Please don't pattern match me lazily onto typical silicon valley archetypes. I know and follow basic healthy living advice, yet it is still perfectly obvious where I'm lacking regardless. There shouldn't be this abyss between tiers of people and this burning need for verbal copes should not exist either.

Platitudes are a mind killer.

[astrange]

Following it is good, but if that’s not enough the answer is still going be something else basic. It’s probably never nootropics in practice until you get past several more kinds of boring stuff.

For instance, the best society wide interventions for kids still aren’t going to be fancy chemicals, it’s going to be better air quality esp. near highways and in schools, and that’s assuming we took care of maternal nutrition.

[sinenomine]

> but if that’s not enough the answer is still going be something else basic.

Why should it be this way, is there a Law of the Universe mandating every human shortcoming being some regrettable lifestyle flaw?

> For instance, the best society wide interventions for kids

... it's better to avoid this beaten topic, this is not a hill I'm willing to die on today.

[astrange]

> Why should it be this way, is there a Law of the Universe mandating every human shortcoming being some regrettable lifestyle flaw?

Oh, I don't mean only basic things are helpful, I mean if it works it'll become "basic". Like if a nootropic really worked that well we'd call it either a vitamin or a medication. (NAC and modafinil are here, and half the other effective ones like Semax are medications in Russia.)

> ... it's better to avoid this beaten topic, this is not a hill I'm willing to die on today.

That's funny since I don't think anything I said there is common wisdom yet, it's my personal hot take.

[tehchromic]

With respect, I think you missed the point of the article! It's that we are all 10x engineers in the right context, even if that's providing the context for someone else to be 10x, which of sounds like you are 10x at!

[pts_]

That's highschool thought process. Adult thought process is to give your best, for your best.

[hooande]

> Everything they worked on they did better and faster and cleaner. They could often solve problems that other skilled people couldn't even get started on.

They may have actually closed tickets 10x faster (which I doubt), but that wasn't providing 10x the value to the company. If there was one person who was resolving 10x the issues of everyone else, that person would be a (very overworked) legend. And I doubt they could keep it up. But it isn't like the company they work for will make 10x the revenue or produce software that is ten times better than the previous version.

The person you're describing is good at their job. There's no need for a number. We don't describe fast food workers as "10x fry cooks", even if they are faster than everyone else in the kitchen.

[agumonkey]

let's make the twitch stream their workflows :)

[lostdog]

You joke, but I'd love to pair with my current local 10x-er. It will be like bringing my honda civic to the grand prix, but it should be educational at least.

[agumonkey]

:) cute metaphore and known feeling

[akomtu]

Do they also get paid 10x?

[sokoloff]

That's the craziest part of the whole thing. They are almost always paid more but rarely paid more than 2x their (rough) peers. It's the greatest overlay in employment and why they're so sought after.