[zkirill]

I always thought the term "10x engineer" was only used in job ads. Nobody I know refers to themselves (or even thinks of themselves) as a "?x engineer", unless it's for marketing purposes in which case you might as well put 100x for good measure.

The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing". They may also say that the most valuable thing that they have learned over their career is humility. There is always going to be something new and shiny to learn, things will always be breaking around you, a fake prophet will push today's ideology to sunset yesterday's. The only thing that you can do is to always be resourceful, to grow holistically as a person, and help others grow as well. Avoid any company that tries to distill these virtues inside banal presentations and check-the-box training sessions. It is better to ask an unassuming looking person inside the company if they have grown as a person, who helped them, and whom are they helping do the same. Good luck!

[jl2718]

I am a 10x engineer. I have the awesome capability to show you that a project is going to cost 10x the time/budget, and why you don’t need it, and should probably focus on the obvious 1x idea.

[szundi]

If you can quickly cope with reality and accept some of the surprising stuff out there, I believe then you can be a 10x. Although this makes the scope 2x and you are just 5x then

[jcpst]

I always go with 11x engineer. It’s even better than 10x

[jl2718]

11x abs…. What are you, crazy? Nobody can work out their abs in 11x.

[tartoran]

But if you claim to be a 10x you’d be able to finish their 1x idea in 1/10th of the time wouldn’t you?

[SuoDuanDao]

It is 1/10th the time of the original idea...

[bjornsing]

I don’t mind calling myself a 10x engineer, but it’s of course better when others do so. ;)

Honestly I’m quite tired of this false humility norm. Seems to me it’s mostly about redistributing the fruits of common labors from those that focus on the craft and try to improve their productivity, towards the socially focused “humility experts”. I much prefer working with cocky 10x engineers rather than these humility policing 1x ones…

[yourapostasy]

> Honestly I’m quite tired of this false humility norm.

It is a matter of where you focus your humility.

Your accomplishments and deliveries? Absolutely market how they are 10X impacts than the norm. No need to label them "10X" of course. Point out their impacts, and the impact craters on problem spaces label themselves. And thereby you get labeled.

How much you rely upon everyone around you and they in turn rely upon you? Absolutely show humility here. These days, 10X impacts don't happen frequently until entire teams are coordinating together over long periods of time.

The knowledge tree in our industry is effectively infinite in all directions now. No matter how broad your reach, there are always more topics you haven't been exposed to. No matter how deep your "T" stem areas, there is always more depth to plumb even if you are at the cutting edge, for the fundamental limits of physics is the only true bottom of that trench.

Humility is absolutely essential when offering to help others and organically receive help from others to mutually cover everyone's gaps across this functionally infinite canvas of knowledge when taking down objectives together.

[bjornsing]

> Humility is absolutely essential when offering to help others and organically receive help from others to mutually cover everyone's gaps across this functionally infinite canvas of knowledge when taking down objectives together.

I don't know... Humans have a very strong tendency to promote cultural norms that will make them successful. So the socially focused "humility experts" want to make the game about humility. One of their IMHO less ethical moves is to sabotage others who do not want to play their game.

I'm good at writing software and leading software teams. I want the game to be about that: the software. I have no problem what so ever with people being proud of their work. I'm not going to refuse to help someone because I don't think they are humble enough. It would never even cross my mind. It would defeat the purpose: creating great software.

[yourapostasy]

> One of their IMHO less ethical moves is to sabotage others who do not want to play their game.

Oh, those are straight up assholes in a different clothing of the week. Yeah, once I identify one of those, I route around them if I can, or they find that my teams and I will only work with them on a very formalized, documented in the open, by the book, unfailingly positive and polite basis. If I have to, the juniors I advise will see their work that is unavoidably interfacing with such people championed by other managers and me.

It vastly slows down the delivery velocity around said person, but I've found no other solution when I'm forced to work with them as they're utterly toxic to work with otherwise. Such a person will find the Nash equilibrium adjusts the more they give up said behavior, but in my experience I've never seen one of these types turn completely around (but that might just be a function of only consulting and not sticking around long enough to find out).

[throwaway0147]

The problem in my experience is that cocky attitudes have a tendency to spread and it creates a really difficult work environment.

You also have to take the Dunning-Kruger effect into account, where most developers aren't able to evaluate themselves correctly. In our work we have a tendency to view thing as "right" and "wrong". I often find people with a few years of experience to be the worst. They have enough experience to recognise that they are more knowledgable than juniors, but lack the overall picture.

Some even come out of studies this way, because they are used to being the smartest in their class and have built up their egos. "Why is the old shitty code written this way, they must have been stupid? We need to rewrite it in the framework I read about in the blog last week". Only experience will teach them that things are not that simple. If they are not exposed to the right working environments in their first jobs, they will spread this negativity for years until they (hopefully) grow as persons.

Pro tip: If something looks unnecessarily complex, there may actually be a reason for it. In the case where you need to rewrite/refactor working stable code, don't try to negatively push down others to enhance your own feeling of superiority. Keep the arguments as objective as possible. If you have tracked the code to specific individuals, at least talk to them in private first to get their input instead of assuming you know best.

[bjornsing]

Thanks for this. These are all real problems. But why is the solution that I change my behaviour?

This is exactly what I'm tired of: Because other people are assholes with big frail egos who do not understand their place in the world... I have to change? No, they have to change.

Putting this on me just glosses over and prolongs the real problem: That a lot of people with frail big egos need to realize they are not all that and come down to earth.

[notac]

honestly from reading how you write about yourself, I would immediately drop you into the "thinks more highly of themselves than they ought". Bucket. People who call themselves high performing rarely are in my experience. It's the humble people who learn and grow for the joy of it who truly shine.

[bjornsing]

Being proud of your abilities and accomplishments is not mutually exclusive with curiosity and joy of learning.

More generally: Your perceived correlations are not necessarily causal relationships.

[joxel]

Thanks for this. There’s too much of me in this than I would like..

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

There's a difference between cocky and confident.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

I agree with this, one of the things I absolutely hate seeing (on this site, no less) is the whole "imposter syndrome". It's basically humble bragging.

This is my strength and I'm absolutely better at it than most. There's lots of things I'm completely inadequate at, this aint one of 'em.

[whywhywhywhy]

The lie that being humble is a virtue is something you have to unlearn.

In reality if you won’t shout about how great your work is how can you expect anyone else to care about it.

[noufalibrahim]

I think it's a marketing thing. I'd call myself that if i were attending a job interview perhaps and trying to sell myself.

I wouldn't call myself that if I were speaking to a junior developer and helping him with something that's difficult enough to sap his confidence.

[schwartzworld]

A smart 10x engineer would use his special power to do 1/10 the work everyone else does.

[randomdata]

As a dumb 10x engineer, I once tried being on the job 1/10th the hours of my colleagues and I still ended up outproducing them by an order of magnitude. I failed to account for the fact that they waste a lot of time doing unrelated tasks, like meetings, leaving only a fraction of their day to get anything done.

[theshrike79]

For some of us meetings are 90% of the job.

I mostly integrate with other teams' services. Most of my time is talking with them (in "Meetings") about their API and reading through their documentation.

Code is like 10% of my week, maybe 20-25% if I'm starting with a fresh service.

[randomdata]

Mine too these days. Further proof of my dumbness.

It's amusing that we can integrate with open source APIs without any trouble, even when there is often much more complexity involved, without ever talking to the person/people behind it, but as soon as its within a single organization it becomes a game to find pointless busy work to fill the hours.

[derwiki]

It’s not pointless, look at all the cross functional work you can put on a few engineers’ perf reviews.

[mylons]

how is that dumb of you? even as a salaried employee your time is ultimately what you’re selling to your employer. you just reduced your cost of goods by 10.

[randomdata]

Well, I could have also put in 1/10th of the work, not just 1/10th of the hours, and matched their output. Also, I'm just naturally dumb.

[mylons]

lowering the quality effects the perception of the quality of your product. i don’t think it’s smart to do that.

i’m curious if you’re being facetious, though, due to a possible resentment of your co workers. IF you’re doing that, remember you’re just being paid to do YOUR job. management knows who the performers are.

[randomdata]

Why would quality be reduced? Producing 1x output can still be of high quality.

What kind of resentment would there be towards my coworkers? I am not sure where feelings would be coming into play at all, let alone ill feelings.

[sneak]

Or they would try to work as much as possible, earning 10-10000x more than everyone else does.

[ramblerman]

The term doesn't come from people calling themselves 10x engineers.

It was from a study that showed vast differences in performance across software engineers, up to 10x.

The study has been criticized somewhat since then but I think the critics miss the point. Regardless if it is 2x or 10x, or somewhere in between, these differences do exist.

[blowski]

The suits seem to think it's about how quick they type or how focused they are, but this is of course nonsense. Some engineers have such deep knowledge of their tech stack they avoid making costly mistakes, or use features in their stack that would otherwise get re-implemented in the codebase. This can make them more like 100x developers.

For example, we had slow query performance in Postgres. I (a 1x engineer) couldn't optimise the query, so I suggested building out a caching layer, with an estimate of 2-3 weeks. My colleague (a 10x engineer) used a window function that took about an hour.

Perhaps from their perspective, I'm a -10x engineer.

[paulcole]

> It was from a study

In case anybody is curious, here’s the study from 1968:

https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/481/readings/productivit...

[singron]

I thought it was from Peopleware. They claimed they found the result by performing coding wargames among professional programmers in the 80s.

They claim that the best are 10x better than the worst but only 2.5x better than the median. Additionally programmers from the same organizations had very similar performance. I.e. there probably isn't a 10x difference in performance within your company.

The book claims similar distributions when you measure many kinds of human performance, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were many studies that replicated the general idea.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

The study was of students, no one has a strong idea of how that actually correlates to professional work.

Myself personally, I don't think it does, not because some people aren't naturally better at programming than others, but because at some point the important decisions are unrelated to programming and are more about systemic decisions at a wholistic level.

[hu3]

I've seen -1x engineers too (and probably have been one).

[HPsquared]

I think the -10x engineer is more common, and therefore this type has has more overall impact, than the +10x type.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Don’t be so small minded. I’ve seen -infinity project managers and architects.

[sweaty]

> The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing"

This just tells me that the engineer in question is very good, but also has imposter syndrome.