The truest 10x engineer I ever encountered was a memory firmware guy with ASIC experience who absolutely made sure to log off at 5 every day after really putting in the work. Go to guy for all parts of the codebase, even that which he didn't expressly touch.
I feel you. I had a semi-traumatic experience at a previous job, combined with a number of other factors which have left me feeling like a shell of my former self. Now I'm sure if I'm working at .5x or if I feel like .5x. Such is life, at times.
The “10x engineer” comes from the observation that there is a 10x difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. By saying that you want to be a 1x engineer, you’re saying you want to be the least productive engineer possible. 1x is not the average, 1x is the worst.
What we do know is that the worst engineers provide negative productivity. If 1x is the worst engineer, then let's for the sake of discussion denote x as -1 in order for the product to be negative. Except that means the 10x engineer provides -10 productivity, actually making them the worst engineer. Therein lies a conflict.
What we also know is that best engineer has positive productivity, so that means the multiplicand must always be positive. Which means that it is the multiplier that must go negative, meaning that a -1x and maybe even a -10x engineer exists.
Thank you. This sounds so trivial at first, but your reductio ad absurdum at the beginning of your comment really nails it.
Throw into the mix the fact that productivity is hard to measure as soon as more than one person works on something and that doesn't even begin to consider the economical aspects of software.
And even when ignoring this point, there's that pesky short-term vs long-term thing.
Also, how do you define the term "productivity"? I was assuming that you mean somethint along the lines of (indirect, if employed) monetary output.
You are arguing against the idea that there is a factor of ten difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. That’s fine if you want to do that, but that’s explicitly where the term “10x engineer” comes from and what defines its meaning. So if you disagree with the underlying concept, there is no way for you to use terms like “[n]x engineer” coherently since you disagree with its most fundamental premise. You certainly shouldn’t reinvent different meanings for these terms.
The problem here is the introduction of productivity.
The 10x developer originated from a study that measured performance. The 10x developer being able to do a task in a 10th of the time is quite conceivable and reflects what the study found. I'm sure we've all seen a developer take 10 hours to do a job that would take another developer just 1 hour. Nobody is doing it in negative hours, so the math works.
Measuring productivity like that in technology makes no sense because our work is not fungible; what and how we do it matters as much as how fast we do it. Time-based productivity measurement is for factory workers stamping out widgets. So in our revenue-based world, negative productivity makes sense.
Performance. That is what the study that found a 10x performance difference observed. There is no mention of productivity in the study. If anyone has tried to study productivity, they most certainly have not come up with a 10x moniker. It seems productivity was mentioned in this thread only because it also happens to start with the letter 'p' and someone got confused.
Productivity in this case is performance on contrived tasks that don't represent day-to-day work well and for some of which negative score isn't possible.
Okay, but it still doesn't work. The world's worst engineer who somehow managed to successfully contribute one line of code to something like GPT is way more productive than a great engineer who designed from top to bottom the best laid software ever conceived but was thrown away before seeing the light of day because the business changed direction.
Of course, that doesn't actually matter as the original study found a 10x difference in measuring performance, not productivity. There is nothing out there to suggest that some developers are 10x more productive outside of those who mixed up their p words. We're not actually talking about productivity; that was just a mistake. If one were to study productivity, I expect they would find that some engineers are many orders of magnitude more productive than the least productive engineers.
> The world's worst engineer who somehow managed to successfully contribute one line of code to something like GPT is way more productive than a great engineer who designed from top to bottom the best laid software ever conceived but was thrown away before seeing the light of day because the business changed direction.
I reject that assertion.
> performance, not productivity
You keep saying this like it's a slam dunk refutation, but performance and productivity are highly related.
Because you don't believe the worst developer contributed anything to GPT? Sure, in reality that's no doubt true, but it was only ever meant to be illustrative.
> but performance and productivity are highly related.
Not in any meaningful way. The study found that the fastest developer can perform a set of defined tasks in a 10th of the time of the slowest developer. That is what the 10x developer refers to. But being fast doesn't mean being productive.
Come to my backyard and we will each dig a hole of equal size. Let's assume that you can dig the hole in a 10th of the time I can – that you are the 10x hole digger. But, no matter how fast you are, neither of us will be productive.
Except you haven't explained it at all. Sackman, Erickson, and Grant found that some developers were able to complete what was effectively a programming contest in a 10th of the time of the slowest participants. This is the origin of the 10x developer idea.
You, on the other hand, are claiming that 10x engineers are 10 times more productive than the worst engineers. Completing a programming challenge in a 10th of the time is not the same as being 10 times more productive, and obviously your usage can't be an explanation, even as one you made up on the spot, as the math doesn't add up.
That was designed as a repeatable experiment, which seems entirely reasonable when you want to conduct a study. Why are you characterising that as “a programming contest”? That seems like an uncharitably distorted way of describing a study.
> Why are you characterising that as “a programming contest”?
Because it was? Do you have a better way to repeatedly test performance? And yes, the study's intent was to look at performance, not productivity. It's even right in the title. Not sure where you dreamed up the latter.
i believe the original was for an entire "organizations" performance, and was also done in 1977. Since they are averages, It makes "sense" to conclude that the best of a good team is 10x better than the average of the worst team. Not really what the experimwnt concludes but what can you do.
Hmm, I never thought of it that way. I just heard 10x employees and fit it to what I knew. Which is that 90% of the work is accomplished by about 10% of workers. The other 90% really only get 10% done. So most developers are somewhere on a scale of 0.1 - 1. With 1 being a totally competent and good developer. The 10x people are just different though, it's like a pro-athlete to a regular player. It's not unique to software development, though it may stand out and be sought after more. I've noticed it in pretty much every industry. Some people are just able to achieve flow state in their work and be vastly more productive than others, be it writing code or laying sod. I don't find that there's a lot of in between 1 and 10 though.
Even if this was the origin of the term, it still doesn't make sense because the best engineers can solve problems the worst would never be able to do so. The difference between the best and worst is much more than 10x the worst. Maybe the worst who meets certain minimums at a company, but then the best would also be limited by those willing to work for what the company pays, and I hypothesis that the minimums of the lower bound and the maximums of the upper bound are correlated.
It sounds like you disagree with the concept of a 10x engineer then. In which case you should avoid using the term, rather than making up a new definition.
Concepts and words change meaning and sometimes we all need to accept that the popular meaning is not the definition we use.
This is especially common when dealing with historical or academic definitions versus common modern usage. "Evolution" particularly annoys me.
You should avoid using the term, rather than using a definition at odds with common usage. Your usage is confusing - and that is why you are getting push-back.
The definition you have given is nonsensical - it can't be consistent over time or between companies because it depends on finding a minimum in a group. And a value that is strongly dependent on the worst developer is useless because it mostly measures how bad the worst developer is - it doesn't say anything about how good the best developer is.
Do 10x engineers get 10x the wages? Somehow I feel being exceptionally better than other engineers is just unfair to both of you and the ones worse than you. I wouldn't want to be a 10x either, I'd rather just be normal engineer.
Meta compensates 10x types very well. 3x bonus multipliers, additional equity that can range from 100k-1m+, and level increases are a huge bump to comp (https://www.levels.fyi/)
Meta compensates all SWEs very well. To suppose arguendo that 10x types exist, I don't think they're really compensated linearly 10x more than everyone else. But yeah, certainly, if you are great at your job and want to make a bunch of money, Meta is a great employer for that.
3x bonus multiplies (Redefines Expectations) are extremely uncommon. Level increases certainly help but like, L7 only makes ~3x what L5 does -- not 10x. And there are few L7s and very few L8+.
