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Comment by hawk_ | Hacker News Reader

> Wrote hard-to-understand procedural code to 5000-line files. Did not actively share knowledge with his peers.

The author seems to mean prima donna, not a 10x engineer and then goes on to destroy that strawman.

Actively sharing knowledge, mentoring etc... and code and architectural simplicity are a given for someone who's 10x productive. Most of the costs are in maintenance not the initial delivery and a 10xer's output would deliver over the life of the software use. Hard to decipher code doesn't sound like it would fit that bill.

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I'd agree. I don't think the article is refutes that "10x engineers exist" - more that some engineers who are able to work fast are incorrectly labelled "10x"

i.e. Having more knowledge or banging out shonky code might let you appear more productive than your peers, and you should probably adopt more metrics than simply coding tasks getting completed.

Indeed! Did he get time to "share knowledge with his peers". Would he have been credited for it? Would his position in the corporation have gotten more secure?

In a U.S. corporation, the answer to all these questions is "no".

I strongly suspect those conditions are not confined to the US.

This here. I think the author is confusing what a 10x developer is.

I took the 10x dev to mean somebody who may work efficiently but also improves all of the devs around them. Improving yourself by 2x is one thing but improving the team around you by 2x is where you get the 10x.

No, the 10x developer is someone who, alone in a room, can ship in y period of time the same thing it would take 10 median developers y units of time to ship, or one median developer 10y units of time to ship.

Because of the mythical man month, the 10 will actually take >y time to do it, due to coordination overhead. The 10xer will still ship the item in 1y. A big part of the leap from 5x to 10x is being able to dodge communication overhead.

Some are also good at boosting their team. Some only work well alone.

> the author is confusing what a 10x developer is.

Its a subjective definition. You have a different one to the author. sneak has a different definition to you.

That's a part of the problem: there's no clear definition and the label "10x developer" means different things to different things.

Some of these definitions definitely are a myth. Some are not. But the conversations about it tend to not be that meaningful, because everyone argues their own definition, which may or may not match up with other people who are also arguing theirs. The best we can do is define our definition and then state our reasoning about it and then others can agree or disagree or say yes but if you define it this way that I do, then its different because whatever.

Right now, everyone has a different definition and the discussion isn't that useful.

My coworker is a beast at churning out working code, but mine is often better abstracted and requires less refactoring to use in the future.

There are features where I spent 5-10x the time he'd do, but my code could then be used to later implement several dozen feature requests in mere minutes rather than hours and days.

Who's better? I'd say we've got different strengths, so depends on what you need to get done.

Your coworker is better, sounds like you spend a lot of time on premature generalisation.

Technically premature yes.

But I do have experience guiding me. It's not like I'm abstracting everything I do. So my efforts tend to pay off.

Yeah, this reads like a straw man attack on a particular and not widely accepted view of what a 10x engineer is.

Yeah, great programmers are also great documenters and also process-oriented and detailed

Dennis Ritchie, Vitalik Buterin, Jeff Dean exist

The author is talking about people who are perceived by management to be 10x developers and why that perception can sometimes be flawed.

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