[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.