Thread by @onealexharms

Wow. I just read the “10x Engineers” thread, and I have something to say. (I found it by using twitter search.)

I gotta be direct. That guy’s description is just flat-out mistaken. Erroneous.

Reading that thread my jaw dropped lower & lower & lower. And then I said “what?!”

I definitely know the kind of engineers who are amazingly skilled, knowledgeable, experienced (like 20, 30 years experience, and growing the whole time). The kind who will help your startup succeed.

They are not like he described.

The ones I know are smart, kind, and generally really *good* mentors. They mostly don’t hate (all) meetings. The few really strong engineers I know who complain about meetings are *less effective* than the ones that communicate and collaborate well.

Sometimes they code at night. More often they go hang out with their family at night. Sometimes they code for an hour, and then take a break. Sometimes they code for 6 hours straight and then they say “oof, that was dumb. I should have taken a break.”

They are not all late night coders. And often, late night coders who seem like superstars will break your shit. You’ve been warned.

Some like to start work at 10am. Also, some like to start at 7am. They all know how to leave stuff in a good place when it’s time to walk away.

They don’t know the entire codebase. They don’t know exactly where to find a bug and fix it in “hours vs. days”. They know how to read the code, and how to debug. If your “strongest” engineer keeps the entire codebase in their head, that is likely to cause you big problems.

And nobody, not even the Glorious Amazing 10x Engineer, knows how the code needs to evolve. That’s not how evolution works. We learn as we go.

The folks who mentor me make small changes, make sure it still works, and make more small changes.

If you want a really strong team, it’s great to look for somebody special. Somebody with a lot of knowledge & experience, who is caring & communicative. Watch out for your biases so you don’t miss them. Maybe they’re quiet. Maybe they’re a woman. Maybe they don’t like caffeine.

What’s probably a less-good idea is to decide they’re “10x” because they don’t mentor, they’re the only one who knows the codebase, or they code with an editor that has a black background. (What?!)

There aren’t really shortcuts to finding a wise, smart, kind, experienced engineer to help you succeed.

Instead of looking for shortcuts, try this:

Ask some engineers who they know who
- knows a ton of stuff
- is great to work with
- knows how to work in a shared codebase
- knows how to _not _ try to keep the whole thing in their head
- will collaborate in a useful meeting & can explain why an unhelpful meeting is unhelpful

Oh, and they definitely, _definitely_, *definitely* read documentation. And google. They are not afraid to not know things (several zillion times a day). They get really really stumped by bugs. They keep at it until they figure it put, but first they cuss & sometimes cry.

Reading documentation all the time, btw, is why they know
- several languages
- why Unix is doing this weird thing
- how come a weird bug (that took a day and a half to find, thank you very much) happened
- why git is broken
- 7 alternatives to that library

It's also how they found out what that bug was. It took a day and a half because your codebase uses 11 libraries and 2 frameworks & that's a lot of documentation. Which they read, because they didn't have it all memorized.

Also, your codebase is too complex for any human (no matter how much caffeine, no matter how dark they like their ide) to keep in their head. A big part of an engineer's job is managing that complexity so nobody needs to try.

Okay, that's my rant.

Really strong, wise, smart, experienced, and kind engineers exist. They’re incredibly valuable, and you would do well to seek them out & work with them. But geez. Not by looking at the background color of their IDE or their collection of Mountain Dew.

💙