[procaryote]

Some companies suck at promoting the right people, but a good principal engineer is the 10x person, or someone who makes several teams more effective by helping them figure out the bigger technical issues.

If you think management is like 1x talent and effort, you should try management for a bit.

[ninetyninenine]

I have. It's more stressful. But it's still 1x talent and 1x effort. Anyone can do it, it's just harder in the same way being a garbage man is hard.

10x engineers don't need to be principals. The idea behind principals is that they don't do any engineering. They leverage the work of others to become 10x. It's very much considered a "leadership" or management role overall.

A 10x engineer is usually literally a person who can output 10x through his own work alone. As a sidenote, with AI everyone is now 10x. So it's really a 20x thing now.

[procaryote]

I've seen zero people become 10x because of AI. Conservatively it seems closer to ±0.5x and it takes a while to figure out if it's + or -

I didn't understand the point of managers until I got a good one. Perhaps you've just been unlucky

[ninetyninenine]

I literally see the opposite. What I'm seeing is if you're not using AI, you're going to be left behind. What used to take a week or more is now expected to be finished in a day thanks to AI. The expectations have shifted by a lot.

I do know there are entire companies who have not bought into AI yet because the paradigm shift happened so quickly. The AI of 1 year ago could not make someone 10x. The AI of today can and if everyone knew about it, they would be using it.

>I didn't understand the point of managers until I got a good one. Perhaps you've just been unlucky

There is a point. The point is to set direction and to shield the engineer from politics. That is the point. Let me make it utterly clear: The role of leadership and management is REQUIRED. I never said otherwise.

My point, however, is to say that the primary skill involved in setting direction and shielding the engineer from politics and all this "leadership" stuff is this:

it is hard work, but it is not skilled work. The garbage man works hard, but anyone can do his job. There are certain people who do a shit job at being a garbage man and there are people who do a good job, but the overall job is considered unskilled labor. That is essentially what "leadership" is. And like the garbage man, the job is required.

The main difference between the garbage man and the leader is essentially perception. Because leadership is essentially a form of control, perception is controlled. That means leaders are perceived to be better and they are thus paid more but the on the ground truth is that what they do is not skilled work.

[untrust]

> The AI of today can and if everyone knew about it, they would be using it.

The AI of today absolutely does not add 0.5x, I'm using cursor and copilot and they still are usually just a fiddly tool which gets it right half the time. Anything complicated enough to need me to review its work takes longer through series of prompting and correcting its work than if I did it myself, and anything trivial enough for it to one shot its not saving me much time on anyways. All for a costly monthly subscription.

[ninetyninenine]

Unfortunately my on the ground experience is drastically different from you. I use Claude code though so that might be the difference.

But AI for me is right 90 percent of the time. It’s possible our prompt engineering is different.

> The AI of today absolutely does not add 0.5x, I'm using cursor and copilot and they still are us

You know when people say shit like this I wonder if they ever are able to think from another perspective? Like they say one thing but tons and tons of other people are saying another thing and what gets me absolutely curious is how someone can be so brain fucking dead that they can’t even consider the other perspective. Tons and tons of people say what you say but an equal amount say the opposite.

[procaryote]

This is a bit of a naive view of what a manager does. I've hired lots of managers and have interviewed a lot more, and there are definite real skills to the role. Those skills include hiring good people, fixing teams that don't work well, etc

It would be lovely if all they needed to do was point vaguely in some direction and stop other managers from talking to the team. I could hire much cheaper people for that

[ninetyninenine]

Those are skills those are some guidelines that once people follow it most people can do it.

Nowhere did I say we needed to point in a general direction and let it go.

[willseth]

Maybe you were just bad at management and didn’t know it.