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Comment by aleqs | Hacker News Reader

The corporations and executives are already winning if you swallowed the concept of 'rockstar' engineer. Sure there are more and less experienced engineers, but even interns can and often do provide good input and spot mistakes made by seniors. The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process).

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>The 'rockstar' engineer at most tech companies simply equates to the somewhat autistic guy with a brown nose who's working 15 hour days for a pat on the head from management (and making many mistakes in the process).

I love it! And posts on HN about Big Ideas and uses corpspeak to justify driving people to long hours. The engineer who's picked up talking points of his employer because he's well-paid and trapped on the spectrum, making it hard to comprehend a life of Play outside of work.

For the most part there aren’t 10x engineers

But there are certainly 0.1x engineers

The study that defined the 10x engineer defined him as 10x as good as the worst engineer. If there is a 0.1x engineer, and a 1x engineer, that 1x engineer is the very definition of a 10x engineer.

I've long thought a 10x engineer is one with just the right amount of analysis paralysis - not too much or too little. It's not that they're 10x engineers, it's that everyone else is 0.1x due to a confluence of reasons. And the ones we call 0.1x are 0.01x.

Some famous examples of a "10x developer" state: Linus Torvalds writing Git, Brendan Eich writing JavaScript. Somewhat less famously, I get that feeling often when I stop thinking and start doing on an electronics project, a wooden shed or even a cosplay. Every hackathon ever, same principle - stop thinking, start doing.

But it's only a 10x state if you're doing the right thing, otherwise it's a -10x state, and that means you need to have already done the right amount of thinking and have a good intuition for what you're trying to do. (As long as you can recognize a failed experiment and revert, risk of being -10x isn't that terrible)

There certainly are 10x engineers just that they get most of the x from turning down bad ideas and saving work.

and -10x

This is such an obvious observation that I’m surprised to find it often missing. 0.1X is nothing compared to the destruction (ie negative X) you can do with the right combination of recklessness and managerial pressure. Definitely happens with engineers. Perhaps even more with PMs.

Even if we forget "rockstar", there are certainly different levels of engineers. More experience doesn't automatically mean better either. That is not to say experience doesn't matter. It matters quite a bit. Sure , good interns can sometimes have good feedback or spot mistakes. But not consistently enough.

All of this to say that it's not just experience that makes one a better engineer.

Experience is one of the only objective signals we have, but you're right it's not the only one. I've seen plenty great junior engineers and interns, and plenty of incompetent staff/principal engineers.

True, it is the only objective signal, but as you have observed as well, it is also a very poor one.

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