I often wonder how much of 10x engineers is circumstance vs talent/skill. Separate from the issue of LLMs.
If I can write blue sky / green field, code. Brand new code in a new repo, no rules just write code, I can write tons of code. What bogs me down are things like tests. It can take more time to write tests than the code itself in my actual work project. Of course I know the tests are important and maybe the LLM can help here. I'm just saying that they slow me down. Waiting for code reviews slows me down. Again, they're super useful but coming from a place where the first 20-25 years of my career I didn't have them they are a drag on my performance. Another is just the size of the project I'm on. > 500 programmers on my current large project. Assume it's an OS. It's just hard to make progress on such a large project compared to a small one. And yet another which is part of the first, other people's code. If I write the whole thing or most of it, then I know exactly what to change. I've written features in code I know in days that someone who was not familiar with the code I believe would have taken months. But, me editing someone else's code without the entire state of the code base in my head is 10x slower.
That's a long way of saying, many 10xers might just be in the right circumstance to provide 10x. You're then compared against them but you're not in the same circumstance so you get different results.
Nah, I've worked with maybe 2 people I'd say were "10x", or at least 5x, and it was definitely skill.
I used to not really believe people like that existed but it turned out they're just rare enough that I hadn't worked with any yet. You could definitely go a whole career without ever working with any 10x engineers.
And also it's not like they're actually necessary for a project to succeed. They're very good but it's extremely unlikely that a project will succeed on the back of one or two very good engineers. The project I worked with them on failed for reasons nothing to do with us.
If I can write blue sky / green field, code. Brand new code in a new repo, no rules just write code, I can write tons of code. What bogs me down are things like tests. It can take more time to write tests than the code itself in my actual work project. Of course I know the tests are important and maybe the LLM can help here. I'm just saying that they slow me down. Waiting for code reviews slows me down. Again, they're super useful but coming from a place where the first 20-25 years of my career I didn't have them they are a drag on my performance. Another is just the size of the project I'm on. > 500 programmers on my current large project. Assume it's an OS. It's just hard to make progress on such a large project compared to a small one. And yet another which is part of the first, other people's code. If I write the whole thing or most of it, then I know exactly what to change. I've written features in code I know in days that someone who was not familiar with the code I believe would have taken months. But, me editing someone else's code without the entire state of the code base in my head is 10x slower.
That's a long way of saying, many 10xers might just be in the right circumstance to provide 10x. You're then compared against them but you're not in the same circumstance so you get different results.