Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

If you can replace an entire team of 10 engineers paid to work on something with a single engineer then that engineer is a 10x engineer, as long as the "10x engineer" didn't originally write the things they work with. That is my definition.

> By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs.

Replacing 10 salaries with 1 salary isn't subjective at all.

View on HN

Of course it is subjective. This is literally what you said:

> That is my definition.

You obviously care about optimizing for salary expenses. Most companies have room to hire more people who can do a few things well, so their definition of 10x would be different because they’ll have different expectations of their employees.

And really, if your definition of a 10xer is some poor fool who’s willing to take the job of 10 people for a single person’s salary, good luck finding someone who wants to spend their lives living that way.

> And really, if your definition of a 10xer is some poor fool who’s willing to take the job of 10 people for a single person’s salary, good luck finding someone who wants to spend their lives living that way.

Right, they are paid more. The going rate for good people is around 1.5x up to 10x for exceptional cases.

Edit: And I am not talking about minimizing cost of salaries, I am talking about how much a good software engineer should demand. If he can replace 10 salaries with one then he has a lot of leverage he should use to get a higher salary, if the company isn't paying him then he should leave for a company that appreciates his skills. Plenty of companies pays premium money for premium talent.

I mean, if all you’re saying is that “better programmers deserve better pay”, then you’re not exactly saying anything groundbreaking and the concept of “10xer” is not going to be necessary to make that point. It should also be noted that the salary that you get isn’t just a product of your talent but also of how well you sell yourself. Amongst many other factors, of course.

Salary isn't just a factor of skill, but willingness to pay high salaries is the same as belief that skill matters a lot. A manager who doesn't believe in high developer skill variation will not pay significantly above market rate, while a manager with strong beliefs in skill variation will pay huge amounts for the right people. Therefore I see any arguments against 10x developers as an attempt to supress wages, likely managers who wants to hire good developers without paying them more than average developers, or developers who are jealous of others salaries. Luckily a lot of companies acknowledges that talent matters a lot and pays a lot for it, and today the highest valued companies in the world belongs to that group.

So y’all don’t disagree with the main point.

There are some specific individual engineers who will get a specific individual task, faster than some other specific engineers.

If those same specific engineers get done many general tasks faster than another group of specific engineers on general tasks than they are just better in general. If some other specific task gets done by the other specific engineers better then it is just different domains.

Either way the individuals matter.

So a fast programmer is necessarily better than one who takes a little more time but pushes out stabler code?

Touché, same quality just one done twice as fast let’s say. Just a hypothetical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com