Most 1x developers just care about getting the job done regardless of care or code quality, which in my experience has led to conflict.
Most 1x engineers/developers care deeply about users and the end product, and also likes to keep the code well maintained and performant, so they can do their peaceful work and go home, while not making the life of the user any more miserable.
Most 10x engineers are too brilliant and remain busy rocking the boat and doing so many mind blowing things at any given time that the destruction trail is only materialising slowly once their presence has faded for a while and the remnants are being pieced together.
I think, we equate the frenzy with 10x(productivity & excellence) while the less creative and cautious ones tend to be the most valuable over long term with most boring stuff.
Of course to each their own, but the too many destructions of the 10x stars had made me very weary these days.
This myth that more productive developers are somehow worse and will ruin projects is just rationalization without any ground in reality.
This is just rationalization.
But can we stop saying people who are good at there job are actually bad at their job and being mediocre actually means you are great?
Like I know I'm being pedantic but this kind of culture is toxic to everyone.
Edit: sorry for ranting under your comment. I'm sure you are a normal person just trying to get through your day. I just had to scream somewhere
People who claim they are 10x'ers are often not. They are mess makers or wannabes. They appear 10x to those who do not take messes or tech debt into account.
You screaming (to use your lingo) that my buddy above is not a 10x is what the rest of us have been screaming about our co-workers!
I'm not claiming people can't be 10x'ers. Nor am I saying being good is actually bad.
In any creative industry Price's is well known phenomen. 50% of work is done by square root of people. But in reality there large number of problems that cannot be solved by average developer.
That why people that build tooling, compilers, important libraries and frameworks make often 100 times more impact. They increase productivity of everyone
e.g. Linus is a classic 10x or 100x engineer and his code(Linux, Git etc) has been maintained by a completely uncoordinated team for decades.
This kind of reply is just flipping the stereotype and going in another insane extreme without any evidence at all, just conflating productivity with recklessness...
If 1x is the absolute rock-bottom lowest possible productivity, are them really the precious angels who care deeply about the user while making amazing code?
This is even more absurd.
You understand the original meaning of the term. This is not how most people use it nowadays.
The assertion made by GP is absurd regardless of the definition, period.
And the 10x you mentioned are not 10x. They are 1x with frenzy.
If one is not multiplying the team output, they are simply 1x or lower (maybe a few exceptions)
More so if in the light of day their work sucks.
Discussions about 10x engineers are not about “wannabe 10x engineers”.
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I have yet to come across an intellectual area where there isn’t a long tail of higher talent.
As the “x” goes up they just get more rare in reality, and even rarer to see. Because they are not always being optimally challenged. Most problems are mundane. And optimally challenging workers isn’t really a business plan for anything.
I think there is such thing as a 10x problem, which you have to find before your 10x engineer really shines. Identifying hard but exceptionally valuable problems to solve takes 10x vision. And time and luck.
If a "10x engineer" is not given 10x problems, they will.. create some.
A 10x engineer that pushes a problem to prod is not a 10x. You get to 10x by not making mistakes, any issue you create sets you back ten squares.
1x is normal. Some people are less, some people are more. Normal is good and predictable. There's nothing wrong with normal. Normal people that put in a decent effort will produce results. That's a good thing. For a lot of long lived software, normal is what you want. You can't reasonably ask normal people to be more than normal. That would be abnormal. Putting in 120% of your best is not a thing. It doesn't work that way. You are doing pretty OK if you are getting 70-80% of your theoretical best. That's what normal is.
There are of course people who are a bit more capable than their average peers. This is often confused with working long hours. The ability to work longer is mostly something young, relatively healthy people are good at. But there's a difference between working longer and working smarter. You can't work 10x more than a normal person. There's only 24 hours in a day. The only logical way to get 10x more done is to work smarter. There is no other way. And some people really just are that good that they get more work done in the same amount of time. Part of that is experience, brains, and just being really efficient with their time.
An exhausted 10x developer is not a 10x developer. Because they'll be perpetually too tired to work smart. So they might be producing a lot of code but it will be the type of code that will need a lot of maintenance. A true 10x developer consistently writes less code with high impact without wearing themselves out too much. Doing that requires skill and experience. The best code is code you don't have to write. Use the right libraries, avoid reinventing wheels, make your code testable (so you don't get bogged down debugging it), don't repeat yourself, etc. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again, automate it. That's your job. Don't keep on doing the same thing. That would be stupid and somebody else will do something smarter eventually.
> 1x is normal.
IIRC the post that came up with the 10x and 1x terminology used 1x as the worst performer. Normal/average was somewhere in between 10x and 1x.
The change to 1x being average in the common understanding seems to have happened because even the people criticizing it have an intuitive understanding that it's correct, they just want the boundaries somewhere else.
You don't have a 10x without there being a 0.1x engineer. And we can't all be right.
Which works for some time, or when extensively coached, but eventually they move since their time is oh so precious and now you have the rest of the team to work with their work. Not that great.
Then people wonder or complain when business doesn't appreciate devs. How would you look at folks who are critical to your success yet often don't have your company's best interest at the center of their efforts.
To use your terms, those 1x devs always end up maintaining and evolving that code of 10x guys. Their velocity with changes is massively lower and error rate is significantly higher compared to code created by 1x devs. This is what business sees and there is not much love for that.
I've seen it first-hand. We ended up building a support team around the 10x:er to keep things working, but it was easily worth it. It worked very well for the life span of the product - about a decade.
Many eventually graduated to pretty fancy places. They learned a lot. This particular 10x:er loved sharing knowledge via pair-programming.
Well, he was always in command of the keyboard (typing insanely fast), but you'd sit next to him and he'd delight in explaining. Eventually you would challenge him on something and then the collaboration/adventure began.
I have had the most intellectually exhilarating times of my life working with this guy.
So yeah, 10x:ers can bring massive value if they are wired to be really nice.
I've met that an instance of that kind of 10x:er (well, 5x:er, in this case). He defaulted to dismissing everyone until they had proven themselves.
I don't think there is much you can do to "improve him".
Does the company have my best interests at the center of their efforts or I can be shown the door at any given moment to please shareholders? No hard feeling pls, it's just business and I have only one life to enjoy.
Anyone wanting to improve their resume or have fun from 9 to 5 is in the right here. Life is short.
However it is my responsibility as a manager to ensure the team is working towards its goals and nobody is making anyone's life difficult.
Some engineers have an obsessive, sometimes compulsive, nature which is actually at odds with the business. These types usually spent a large amount of time in institutionalized learning settings and will be far more opinionated about how their labor is allocated.