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by scarface74 1352 days ago
> The 1x engineer talks about their car and weekend, the 10x engineer talks about technology.

Call me a proud member of the 1x engineer club. When I close my laptop at the end of the day or even when I’m having lunch with my coworkers, few people would know that I’m an “engineer” at all. The list of things that I care about more than technology in my non work life is a mile long. Technology is a means to an end - to support my addiction to food and shelter.
2 comments
maerF0x0 1352 days ago
This is fine for a certain class of work, and disastrous when applied to another class of work.

To use an analogy a physician's assistant[1] doing brain surgery could be a big problem. if you need the latter. Also, you're probably overpaying if you hire the latter to administer Tylenol ...

[1]: exclude the special class of surgical PAs xD

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scarface74 1352 days ago
Spoiler alert: most of the 2.7 million developers in the US aren’t “solving hard problems”. I interact with the people who are writing the services for the largest cloud provider. When I meet them for lunch, they are seldomly talking about work.

For awhile, I was working with the service teams involved with the various AI services trying to publish an open source demo around their services. When we left for lunch we were talking about travel, cars, our families, places to eat, etc.

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29athrowaway 1352 days ago
Most of the millions of plumbers in the US are not solving plumbing puzzles, they're ensuring that plumbing systems work.
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scarface74 1352 days ago
I bet the well adjusted ones don’t talk about plumbing in every sentence.

There is so much more to life than technology - this is coming from someone who did hobby programming in assembly language on four different processors by the time I graduated - in 1996.

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spookthesunset 1352 days ago
I sincerely doubt the 10x brain surgeon talks only about brain surgery in their downtime. I would assert that a true 10x person is smart enough to maintain good work-life balance.

There is an infinite pool work you can do. Smart, real 10x’ers understand what is a priority and are smart enough to pack their shit at the end of the day, go home and do nothing at all with their work.

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mirekrusin 1352 days ago
Maybe 10x are just people whose hobby overlaps with work?
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