Thread by @GergelyOrosz

There’s a debate on whether 10x software engineers exist.

They do: I’ve seen several of them.

And their existence freaks the hell out of me. 5 examples of 10x engineers and why you should be afraid when you see one:

1. The Move-Fast-And-Leave-Behind. A dev with a hacks mindset at a scaleup. They get shit done 10x faster than the engineers who that take this (literally) shit over when it needs to scale, try to reverse engineer it, but ultimately have to toss and rewrite the whole thing.

2. The That’s Trivial To Finish. Someone w many product-minded traits blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-mi… amazing at prototyping and telling the non-technical manager they’ve done 90% of the work, and the other devs should have no problem finishing the last 10%. Which then takes 10x as long.

3. The Only Non Quitter. A company a terrible eng culture and just as bad codebase which oversells itself. Devs quit all the time and the new joiners struggle with everything. Save for TONQ who gets stuff done. Obviously the most tenured dev, and the only one lasting >2 years.

4. The Debugging Machine. A place with a codebase w no tests or documentation. New joiners tend to break everything and TDM needs to be called in to save the day. An engineer who has been around for years, though refuses to ever document/share any of their well-earned knowledge.

5. The Story Point Hoarder. A company where productivity == story points shipped. A tenured engineer who figured out how to make sure every second sprint they claim 5-10x as many story points as most other team members through cherry-picking work, optimising for these points.

So yes, 10x engineers do exist. They live in a mostly unhealthy engineering environments allowing for 10x behaviours.

If the above examples proved anything it’s how we should not ask: “how can we have more 10x devs?”, but answer “why are most our devs at 0.1x productivity?”

10x devs share the trait of being tenured at a company, and being perceived 10x as efficient as most new joiners.

Which begs the questions:
1. Why does an engineer need years of work at the company to get productive?
2. Is perception == reality?

Those are the 10x questions.

2 more archetypes:
6. The Reinvent The Wheel Dev. One of the first engineers at a startup who decides to reinvent the wheel. Writes a custom SPA framework, with layer, MVC abstraction. Then gets everything done 10x faster than new hires (who they label as “not smart enough”)

7. The Stupidly Hard Worker. Typically someone who is also #1 or #6 at some level. They work 12+ hour days, also through most weekends. Management loves them as they’re clearly devoted to the company, and ignores any complaints because this hard work & perceived 10x output.

Finally, my observation on what a highly productive engineer can look like (who I would not call 10x):

blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-cheetah-so…

The subtle hints of what “scares” me is a bit too subtle so let me put it clearly:

It’s not the stereotyped people. They’re all hard workers and get positive feedback.

The scary thing is the environment they operate in, where leadership doesn’t even know/realize the problems.