Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by misnome 11 days ago
For the most part there aren’t 10x engineers

But there are certainly 0.1x engineers

4 comments

The study that defined the 10x engineer defined him as 10x as good as the worst engineer. If there is a 0.1x engineer, and a 1x engineer, that 1x engineer is the very definition of a 10x engineer.
I've long thought a 10x engineer is one with just the right amount of analysis paralysis - not too much or too little. It's not that they're 10x engineers, it's that everyone else is 0.1x due to a confluence of reasons. And the ones we call 0.1x are 0.01x.
Some famous examples of a "10x developer" state: Linus Torvalds writing Git, Brendan Eich writing JavaScript. Somewhat less famously, I get that feeling often when I stop thinking and start doing on an electronics project, a wooden shed or even a cosplay. Every hackathon ever, same principle - stop thinking, start doing.

But it's only a 10x state if you're doing the right thing, otherwise it's a -10x state, and that means you need to have already done the right amount of thinking and have a good intuition for what you're trying to do. (As long as you can recognize a failed experiment and revert, risk of being -10x isn't that terrible)

There certainly are 10x engineers just that they get most of the x from turning down bad ideas and saving work.
and -10x
This is such an obvious observation that I’m surprised to find it often missing. 0.1X is nothing compared to the destruction (ie negative X) you can do with the right combination of recklessness and managerial pressure. Definitely happens with engineers. Perhaps even more with PMs.