Comment by steven2012 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steven2012 | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with 2 10x engineers in my career. I don't know if they were precisely 10x, but they were the most productive engineers I've ever seen. At the startup I worked at, this was the VP. When he left, the company almost collapsed because he was singlehanded doing so many different jobs that we didn't know about. I would say that was more of a negative than a positive, but just from the sheer amount of work he did, he was definitely more productive than the entire team.

I had another friend who was also extremely productive. He never graduated from college, but he was a programming genius. One day he decided to learn ANTLR. Then he decided to deconstruct our query language for our product into ANTLR and discovered several bugs and inconsistencies in the implementation that made it impossible for ANTLR to parse it. Then I said "Hmm, it would be really cool to use ANTLR to read our XDR files and spit out some code that would implement the migration between versions." He said "great idea!" and accomplished that over a weekend, hand-constructing the grammar by hand. He saved the team probably 1 month of work every release cycle. He was absolutely astounding and the best programmer I ever had the honor of working with.

This sounds great. Do you think that their ability to deliver 10x value is based on pure programming skills or is it something else?

I'm managing developers and the ones who are most able to develop software aren't necessarily the most productive ones. I would love to know if 10x developers have simply a different mindset or in essence: What is their core skill that enables them to be so much more productive? Being focused, reducing things to the essentials and managing ones will power and time seems to be a subset of that "10x skill".

It's mostly raw passion. You can't get a 9-to-5 worker excited enough to learn something from scratch over a weekend just to do something she thinks is "cool".

There's also a difference between a better programmer vs more productive. I will never be as productive as the two that I mentioned, but I'm pretty good at programming. I have enough experience to know how to develop a feature and a set of code such that it's easy to read, easy to maintain and doesn't have very many bugs. That's just something I've learned over time. Others may be much more productive than me, but I rarely have to revisit features due to bugs. So there are different measures based on what you want from a team.

> better programmer vs more productive

That's a good point. Honestly, I would prefer a team of developers that are like you vs. outliers that are by definition hard to find and maybe even more difficult to manage. You sound above-average w.r.t your work ethic which is also hard to find and even more important for a strong development team.

> You can't get a 9-to-5 worker excited enough

Would love to know how to achieve that. I use psychological knowledge in my leadership and may have found a way to give people a way to show their full potential. But I'll make further tests before I write about it. Maybe you already have some well-tested tips - I found this infographic and liked it [1].

[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/10-proven-ways-to-build-tru...

Let me simplify it for you: pay them.

A 50k developer in 1980 should be making 260k today if they just following the growth of the economy.

I'd say it's a combination of raw intelligence, passion and ability to see a vision of how things ought to be and bring it into being.

The people that stand out to me aren't necessarily the ones who do what they're told. It's the ones who do what's effective.

Now imagine if your organisation scheduled work in such a way that this could have been done by a "1x engineer" during work hours, instead of relying on this chap to bang it out in the weekend.

It would never have been prioritized. The time to convince others that this was more valuable than other tasks would have far outweighed the time that he spent working on it on his own time. He thought it was a cool idea and just did it without seeking permission.

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