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1/ My timeline is full of this "10x engineer" tweet, mostly hate directed at it. As a 10x engineer, I thought I'd write some comments.
The first is "how to spot a 10x engineer". It's not anything on that list. 10x engineers are as diverse as any other kind of engineer.
The first is "how to spot a 10x engineer". It's not anything on that list. 10x engineers are as diverse as any other kind of engineer.
2/ How you spot a "10x engineer" is whether their contribution to the organization is 10x the lowest engineers. Each does this differently. Some are hermits working in a darkened office producing code. Others are outgoing team leaders spending most of their time mentoring others.
3/ There are certainly a large number of charlatans or negative-x engineers, who think of themselves as massive producers, but who may in fact have negative contribution to the team.
4/ Especially in engineering organizations with poor leadership, engineers spend a lot of time in political battles rather than writing code, where engineers spend a lot of time trying to one-up other engineers. I think this is where a lot of "10x hate" is coming from.
5/ In better run organizations with less political infighting, it's clearer who the key contributors are, and not much fighting over it.
6/ Well-run organizations get rid of all the mere 1x or 2x engineers. A lot of us work for hi-tech companies whose average engineers are already tons better than the ones working for government or big non-tech corporations.
7/ Some of us work for companies where every web developer is intimately familiar with SQL injection. Others work for companies where web developers have never heard of SQL injection, or who believe it's only theoretical.
8/ Thus, you may not spot 10x developers in your organization, but that's because you may not have any 1x or 2x developers. Relatively, that means the best engineers are only 3x the average.
9/ The original thread was how founders/VCs can spot 10x engineers to hire them. I'm not sure you can. When I did my startup (BlackICE) we aggressively recruited high-contributors we'd worked with in the past.
10/ In other words, the solution for founders/VCs isn't to spot individual engineers, but hire experienced engineering leaders and let them hire the teams they want.
11/ The way to drive away high-contributors is to have crappy leadership who can't recognize high-contribution.
