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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

Mainly because I’m helping other people be able to code. One of the interesting things about the 10x engineer meme is that they’re 10x because they improve the productivity of their team. Well extend that to DevRel and that’s maybe another order of magnitude or two of effect again. Extend that to the average person looking to build and it’s another order or perhaps two again. Hopefully the stuff I’m doing now will get ten people off the ground immediately (I already know it’s reached at least this many people) but another 1000 going this year and another 10,000 if not more going over the next two years.

Whereas my programming and design work has only reached tens of thousands interacting with it over the last two years this is hopefully seeding for a big future.

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The 10x engineer being an enabler is a nice interpretation but the original definition of a 10x engineer is a skilled engineer working unhealthy hours.

The enabler 10x engineer may be true - even though I've never found managers so good to multiply their team output dramatically while I've met 10x engineers building incredibly fast and slaving away for a chance to make millions. It could be that's because I found enablers in large companies, where no-one is motivated enough to make millions for rich shareholders somewhere.

I worked on a team with a 10x coder, who was 10x because he improved the rest of the team. Would jump in when people got stuck and unstick them by seeing the yak immediately, where others would just work their way up to it one stack frame at a time. Had a better knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of everyone on the team than they did, and knew how to nudge them towards the work they would excel at without making them feel incapable of the other work. Would unstick people by finding out how they could help other people who were also stuck and vice versa. He got promoted to manager after basically doing managing the way it should be done, without us ever making us feel like we were being managed. And it really was a golden time for our team. Except he quit not long after. Not sure why, but I suspect management brought along a lot of other responsibilities (interfacing with accounting, HR, higher-level management, etc.) that he didn't really enjoy.

I’ve worked with 0.1x engineers, where the whole team is slowed down. It becomes very draining.

This is why I’ve retired and am just doing my own projects

If you work with 0.1x engineers, and you are 1x, does that make you a 10x within the organization?

Alternately, if you are a 10x, does that make everyone else look like a 0.1x?

One would presume that 1x is the baseline for 'competence', which is fine, but being able to do something competently vs. making it worse is really an infinite difference.

This isn’t valued everywhere. I worked at a company where doing that kind of work (piling more hacks on top of what’s already there vs taking a step back and seeing if there isn’t a better way to do it while slightly improving what’s already there) was considered over-engineering things and actively discouraged.

The way to be tall is to seek short company!

I've definitely worked with -1.0 engineers.

Literally every project they were involved in would get slower as people needed to stop everything to deal with them.

This isn't Mythical Man Month stuff either - no matter the size of the new project, adding specific engineers to the project made progress not just halt, but actually go backwards, as all the stuff that worked before was now broken.

EDIT: And yes, bad management was a major issue with the team but some engineers seem to be negative sum, even taking management into account.

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