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Comment by masterof0 | Hacker News Reader

That have not been my experience so far, every time I see a "10X engineer" (worked at several big tech companies) either they have been working in the problem for years or they put 12+ hours of works every day.I don't believe in geniuses myself, never seen one. There are for sure incredible people who have done great things, but you can clearly see, they lack in many other aspects of life. Also, note, that most of those people are not really interested in the "other aspects" of life, but as a complete human being, they have an unbalanced life, obviously, because you need time to develop skills.

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I have worked with 10x developers that were lazy and only really worked a few hours a day. And they still dramatically outperformed everybody else. Their code was simple and 99.999% bug free. So they spend all their time moving forward, delivering feature after feature, while the rest spent 90% of their time fixing bugs and other self-created problems.

Maybe the bar in the team was very low, and that person is just normal, and only have to work that little to do better. When you get to a place where every team member is very good, the 10x engineer cease to exist. I'm sure there are very good engineers, but I doubt 10x is really a thing. I'm yet two find someone that will 10x another person with the same age, educational background, and communication skills.

That might be your experience but not mine. I have been luckily enough to work with really good people most of my career. For example, people I worked with who were good but not 10x went on to work for Google. So are you going to claim that 10x athletes, 10x business people, 10x chess players etc. doesn’t exist as well? And if not why would software development be the one exception from all the rest? Also, perhaps ask yourself why you desperately want it not to be true? What does that tell you about your own self-confidence/ambitions?

I think the 10x thing is about perception, I worked with Principal Engineers at AWS who designed products used by millions, and now similarly at Google, and they just have a ton of experience in a niche area and can leverage that well, with excellent communication skills and vision, but they are not 10x , i would say 1.5x at best. Now, if you think the senior guy on your team is a 10x-er because he knows all the little tricks of Ruby on Rails, or is parroting Martin Fowler non stop, or is the type of person who leave 20 comments in a PR about spacing , code style, etc... then yeah sure, each person can believe whatever. If you want to make the case the true best of the best don't come to FAANG, then I really dunno what to tell you. And regarding your analogy about other areas of life, software is different, software is not a single player game. And lastly, I don't care really, I worked with brilliant people on products used by millions, I feel lucky to work with them, and they too think the 10x engineer thing is a myth.

Look you and your team clearly wants to believe that nobody in the world are better than you. That’s fine. A bit arrogant perhaps? But if it makes you feel good about yourself then why not? No harm done as far as I can see.

Lol, sure.

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