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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

> For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved.

Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually a one time thing. And one time things don't usually make you a 10x dev. Maybe you just got lucky once to see something others missed.

And often times at big places most people know where the low hanging fruits are and can fix them, but management, release schedules and tech debt are perpetually in the way.

IMHO what makes you a 10x dev is you always know how to unblock people no matter the issue so that the project is constantly smooth saling, not chasing orders of magnitude improvements unicorns.

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Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? What I mean is that the existence of the term tends to bring out people trying to figure who that might be, as if it has to be 100% true.

I personally think that some people can provide “10x” (arbitrary) the value on occasion, like the low hanging fruit you said. I also believe some people are slightly more skilled than others, and get more results out of their work. That said, there are so many ways for somebody to have an impact that doesn’t have to immediate, that I find the term itself too prevalent.

"Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? "

Agreed, there is too much effort going into the "superstars" theme, but there are definitely people who get 10x done in the same time as others.

Yep. No matter what you're doing, some people are more productive than others. Often it's a matter of experience and practice, sometimes ability to focus, sometimes motivation, rarely it's a lack or surplus of inherent ability. Using people effectively in the context of a team all depends on the skill of the manager though.

I think a lot of people that complain about 10x chattery in HN should take some kind of carpentry etc course or some other kind of handiwork like that with a real master.

Some of those people not only get things done much quicker, but they also get it done with better quality than an amateur, with less mistakes, throwing away less material, sometimes with more safety.

This is definitely more than 10x better. And there are some real hacks doing those kinds of jobs. I find programming to be not different than that.

Well sure, if you compare a master to a novice, there is almost always a great difference. But between masters of carpentry, there is usually not so much difference. But here with the 10x trope it is supposed to be different and I would say indeed, but it is not as common as many would like to think.

Perhaps there aren’t that many non-master carpenters (I don’t think that’s true, there’s plenty of professional incompetents), but I am 100% sure that not all professional developers are “masters”.

> Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis

You and I have worked at very different organizations. Everywhere I've been has had insane levels of inefficiency in literally every process.

>insane levels of inefficiency in literally every process.

In processes yes, not in code, and solo 10x devs alone can't fix broken processes as those are a the effect of broken management and engineering culture.

People know where the inefficiencies are, but management doesn't care.

same here - it is especially bad in huge companies, the inefficiencies and waste are legendary.

It really does depend on where you work. The order of magnitude improvements I'm describing involved interdisciplinary expertise involving both bespoke distributed build systems and assembly language. They're not unicorns, they do exist, but they are very rare and most engineers just aren't going to be able to find them, even with infinite time. Hence why a 10x engineer is so valuable and not everyone can be one. I myself am certainly not one, in most contexts.

> Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis.

But then you just move on to the next highest leverage task.

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