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Comment by superconduct123 | Hacker News Reader

I think 10x is an exaggeration but I've found its really common to have 1-2 people who do a big bulk of the work

The thing I don't understand personally with these people is why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate to doing so much extra work.

I get it if you're a founder of a startup but not if you're at a big company

Yet every big company I've worked at there are always 1-2 people on the team who seem completely obsessed with the project, like its their main hobby/purpose

It makes me wonder, if someone is so smart that they can do "10x" the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don't get 10x the rewards?

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    > It makes me wonder, if someone is so smart that they can do "10x" the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don't get 10x the rewards?

It is hard to understand other people with freakishly high intrinsic motivation. They look like aliens to the normies.

Maybe because they enjoy the work they do because they love programming and are very happy that they are getting paid well, relative to most professions, for their hobby? Sample size of 1 tho.

    > Maybe because they enjoy the work they do

I feel the same when I read about a career staff engineer for NASA. They work on many cool projects, but the pay is average compared to the tech industry. When they talk about their work, you can see that they have very high intrinsic motivation.

> 1-2 people who do a big bulk of the work

Pareto principle.

> why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate

Some people are just work horses by nature. They're too busy fulfilling their idea of a "job well done" to worry about the relative fairness of their employment.

Not to mention being a 10x coder doesn't mean you can simply parlay your skills into the greatest possible rewards. There's a lot of important context that makes a 10x possible in the first place.

Because it's rewarding in its own right. I can't imagine doing the bare minimum at work -- pretty sure I'd melt of boredom within a week. "Owning" a project/component/whatever keeps things interesting and keeps me engaged, and extrinsic rewards aren't that important if you're making a healthy salary in the first place.

> completely obsessed with the project, like it’s their main hobby/purpose

I think you figured it out.

If your main hobby or purpose is to make someone else rich you're a slave.

So only if you're hating your job then you are a bastion of free will and free thinking among us mortal capitalist slaves?

What about truly enjoying your job and getting paid handsomely for it (compared to almost all other jobs) being sufficient to one's happiness?

Also, if you don't realise that being the one running the show is orders of magnitude harder than following the lead and doing your stuff then you never really done it before. Having ALL the control has advantages and many less obvious disadvantages.

Imagine taking pride in your craft rather than doing only the bare minimum to pad your ego, what a crazy approach!

Taking pride in your craft would mean having enough self-respect to both not burn your soul out for the sake of a corporation that wants to make you redundant and using it in a direction that directly benefits you.

I've been in the industry long enough now to see those 10x engineers having pride in their work get their mindset shattered because John from financials thinks they can juice the next quarter by laying them off.

If you want to have pride in your work as a supposed 10x engineer, work at 2x or 3x and save the remaining for yourself.

A lot of commenters seem not to work with very skilled individuals.

One (engineer-turned) manager I have in mind: show up at 10am, leave at 4pm, solve a zillion hard problems in the mean time. Are they 10x? If they save me 2 weeks of work with their insight then I guess I have to admit yes.

Why, though?

Lots of people are happy to just do whatever, go home and not work on personal projects. Plenty of people here defend it.

Why should productive engineers change their habits just not to be called a sucker?

Save it for myself how, ditch half the work day to go to the gym? I'm going to work 9-5 either way.

Exactly, I'm not saying do the bare minimum

I mean more that the optimal amount of work to put in is still above average but way below 10x

I worked like this. You could have phrased it better.

If you're not making someone with a lot more money than you even richer you're probably not earning much yourself.

This is about how capitalism is structured it's not at all a matter of personal choice.

That honestly doesn't matter if you (no longer) pursue riches yourself, have enough already and enjoy your hobbies. Besides, not everyone working in IT is working in a chique billionarie mill. A lot of IT is just plumbing. Majority even.

if you also make yourself rich in the process, are you still a slave?

I'd love to hear your take on those dumbass medical research scientist slaves who haven't figured out life. Probably wasting their time looking for cures, when they could be starting their own crypto or podcast or innovation-firm instead.

You're right. Coming from my own startup to Microsoft, I worked the same way for quite a long time. Huge regret.

The do work, at 10x efficiency. Or maybe I misunderstood the 10x engineer idea all along!

And that efficiency can translate in 10x output, but it's not guaranteed.

My opinion on the 10x engineer principle, always was that these people have their best development/debug environment setup. And they can traverse, run, and explore code faster than most. Like world record pizza makers in under a minute.

Through my career I've seen some engineers that were stumbling their way around their tooling after years of use, and some that weren't even touch typing. Factor that in.

It’s been described before that this mythical unicorn is instead 10% more efficient- as well as works 10% harder, does 10% more of the right things (e.g. less waste), understands everything 10% better… the multipliers stack. You get the idea.

> why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate to doing so much extra work.

Most of the >1x engineers I met can’t help themselves and be their best version.

it's sorta like, why doesn't everyone just kill themselves you know?

sometimes, you just find fun in things and it's cool. other times, it's like what other other thing you gonna do? fish or hang with people or do drugs or dance? software's a hobby really. sometimes its more fun.

but really it's all preference.

This dynamic is hard to avoid. If you have 1 or 2 people who have more institutional knowledge than the rest of the team, they can burn through more tickets and gain more knowledge through exposure to other people’s problems, which they help with. Then everybody ends up relying on the “hero”, and nobody is really happy about it.

That’s my experience, at least. Cleaner code, separation of responsibilities, and good documentation seem to help though. But I do think a lot of the time people are mistaking “more productive developers” with “devs who got stuck with knowing all the random shit that our horrible codebase relies on” lol

>The thing I don't understand personally with these people is why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate to doing so much extra work.

The reward is there allright, it just isn't monetary.

There are big rewards in future pay, referrals, etc. for establishing a reputation as a great engineer. If you find there aren't then jump jobs.

> if someone is so smart that they can do 10x the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don’t get 10x the rewards

I think this is kind of a nasty attitude. I absolutely cannot stand working with people like this. Why would you insinuate that someone is stupid because they get more done? To me it sounds like you are just insecure about others’ output, so you have to tell yourself that it’s stupid and pathetic to be fully engaged at work.

Depending on the company and person they often are compensated much more down the line when they get fancy titles or apply what they spent more time learning/practicing.

Autism? Does it really matter? People have different priorities in life. Some people stay in academia because they're afraid of the real world.

Once you’re paid some minimum threshold you stop caring about money and start caring about your legacy.

Everyday I grapple with the legacy my coworkers left behind..

Ah yes, my legacy: UserOAuthLoginProfileAPIService

// TODO: migrate to UserOAuthLoginProfileAPIService2 by Wednesday

It's only a regular 9-5. Family is #1 priority, but that doesn't mean I don't take pride in my work. What I get in return is the ability to work remotely in my hometown while the manager wants the rest of the team coming into the office in the Bay Area.

Some people just really like the work they do. There's nothing more to it than that.

Sometimes it isn't even that I like to do something, I just have a very strong feeling it has to be done. The code is asking to be written, the energy has to be spent to lower the entropy. But at least nowdays I can close the damn work laptop at time and not open it until the morning, unlike some a decade or two ago.

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