Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Senior engineers seem to need a lot more social skills than regular engineers. So much of that seems like managerial stuff that at least as a more junior developer I come nowhere close to touching.

View on HN

As much as people laud 10x engineers, the reality is that if you can make the people around you 2-3x more effective you’re likely adding the value of a 15-20x engineer without writing a line of code.

I've never thought of 10x engineers as someone who can crank out 10x amount of code. Influencing others to accomplish larger goals is the best way to scale yourself reliably. And then there are the rare unicorns who can do both, e.g. John Carmack (having indirectly observed his leadership style at Facebook).

Yeah, the 10x debate always seems to be just a disagreement of terms. Are we talking about junior engineers shoving lines of code through the JIRA backlog with no negotiation over what the most effective things to be working on are? Probably not 10x variance, and if there is, maybe they're cutting corners on process.

Are there people who say "I propose we subtly adjust the product in this way which saves us 7 person-months of development effort and 2 months in time to market while delivering 90% of the original proposal's value?" Yeah, there are, and I don't understand why we pretend that can't be a thing.

Don't worry, a lot of that is experience, though at a certain point you have to get intentional about your growth, as not everything comes naturally to most people. And senior engineers are regular engineers too. Well, most of them :) Senior engineers should be partners to managers and yes, there are overlapping skills for sure. That happens because building product is a lot less about raw coding as a less experienced engineer would expect. It's about people and teams and communication to a very degree, in fact. This too you will learn with time.

I consider myself a sociable person and that can have negatives if you're too pally with juniors. They may not take you seriously if they've seen you drunk on the thursday night work drinks. The more senior you go the more of a barrier there should be.

Getting drunk has nothing to do with social skills, except as a poor way to deal with a lack thereof.

As people become more senior, the distinction in skills and responsibilities between managers and engineers starts to blur a lot. In fact, the best folks in both tracks have spend some time in the other track

Reply on news.ycombinator.com