[ndepoel]

AI has increased the perception of productivity to unwitting managers, which is a dangerous pit to be falling into.

It's like a lot of those fabled 10x engineers that I've run into over the years; they may seem like they're incredibly productive and managers love them, but in reality their work is so riddled with issues and rushed half-baked ideas, that they end up costing the other engineers on the team 10x the amount of their time to review and fix it all. And it's those other engineers who do all of the invaluable but underappreciated cleanup work who are getting the boot right now.

[JohnMakin]

Is your assertion that 10x engineers don’t exist? Because I assure you that is false, regardless what your personal experiences may be.

[ndepoel]

Oh I'm sure they exist, that's why I said "a lot", not "all". My point is more about how managers perceive the employees they manage. They all want to believe that they found the goose that lays the golden eggs, but in reality so many perceived rockstar engineers are just over-confident or over-eager people mass producing garbage.

That's the important parallel with using AI in production: on the surface it may seem like the solution to all productivity problems, but in reality it still takes a lot of human brainpower to review, assess, fix and maintain whatever the AI model spits out. Especially since generative AIs like to present their work with supreme confidence, and it's getting increasingly hard to separate the chaff from the wheat.

[xyzzy123]

I think a sizeable % of engineers can be 10x-ers as ICs / leads - but it's kind of an "in the zone" thing, when they're experienced in the stack and the product, can navigate the org, are motivated and aren't held back by issues with team or management (or personal issues etc).

But it's like growing plants, in the sense that it only takes one crucial element to be missing to limit growth (or "output").

I've met a few ppl who were _reliable_ 10xers (could navigate a much wider range of techs / domains / situations than others) but I've seen even the best crash and burn at times when the circumstances aren't right.

[trashtester]

There are also 100x engineers and probably even some 1000x+ engineers.

These are the kind of people who cook up something like git when they take a one year sabbatical from their main project.

Or even hardware people like Jim Keller.

10x engineers are plentiful if you define the median engineer as 1x. There are a LOT of mediocre engineers out there to draw the median down.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

Widespread use of tools like Copilot hasn’t been happening for long enough for you to draw these generalisations with an appropriate degree of confidence. This just comes across as you misrepresenting your personally-aligned hypothetical as reality.

[collyw]

I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the 10x developer stuff is basically down to the 10x person being the original author of the code.

Every other developer on the project has to do at least 3 times as much work, they have to read through the original code and try and understand what the original person was thinking of when writing it before even getting to solving the problem at hand.

A true 10x developer would write code good enough that every other developer could maintain it as easily as the original author.