There are only 5,000 elite software engineers in the world (2025)
jaredpalmer.com
jaredpalmer.com
If by accident, they do end up with an elite engineer, the company most likely doesn’t know what to do with them. Everyone gets beaten down to the same level of mediocrity, suffering the indifference of managers who don’t even know they’ve got an elite engineer. And, oftentimes, the incentives are aligned in the opposite direction.
Many SAY they want elite engineers.
But what they really want is someone who can ship the worst possible muck as fast as inhumanly possible, and still manage to help keep the lawsuits down to a dull roar of just multiple billions of dollars per year. And they want to pay these developers literally zero.
Which is why they all thought that tokenmaxxing would be such a good thing, since it could be used to build virtual engineers that literally cost them absolutely no money at all.
Yes, I worked at Amazon. I know that culture. And they had some seriously elite engineers, at least when I started there.
I also did a six-month stint at Apple Retail Software Engineering a few years earlier. They also had some seriously elite engineers there. Honest-to-goodness real-deal 10x types. And they frequently got yanked from one project to another based on whatever the whim was of Steve Jobs, or whomever was in charge. And they were constantly being pushed to actually produce 100x, not just 10x.
But the problem is that they don't know how to recognize those types of professionals and don't even realize they don't know it.
And the problem can compound.
Companies think someone is an elite engineer because they come from a place "famous" for hiring elite professionals but that, in fact, is one of those that has no idea what an elite engineer is.
Perhaps, this is a hard problem. Or hard enough at least, if I'm being charitable and trying to excuse bad hiring practices.
Most executives(as in the executives at the majority of companies with valuations below big tech) would rather kill themselves than let an employee have any agency.
Don't waste your time.
Humans intrinsically need to feel good about themselves and what they do. It's hard for ye olde ego to think of oneself as replaceable, so we tell ourselves stories about how good we are, or, in the author's case, how good we are at finding the best.
This is just the software industry's fault. More engineers could be elite, maybe not in their first 10 years of their career, but what companies do is cut that short and push engineers away from the technical work, even after a few years. My guess is that the elite engineers had the opportunity to invest in their technical knowledge from childhood.
Perhaps the issue is that there just isn't that much technical work to go around.
While software was booming I remember hearing stories from EEs who found the opportunities in that field lacking. My understanding is that a lot of the people didn't do much technical or engineering work, but those who remained in the field became "BOM spreadsheet babysitters" and "Guy who's only here because we need a licensed engineer to sign off". It really pushed my away from that field even those there are many domains within it that greatly interest me. My understanding is that a lot of the hands on or technical engineering positions went to Asia along with the manufacturing
Instead of doing that, companies could structure to have less engineers with more technical work, and letting them specialize over many years. But part of the incentive is not wanting any one engineer to have too much knowledge in efforts to make them replaceable. It's an unfortunate side effect of how companies optimize things, and the consumer has no way to know or select this at the market level.
I think you're right that many more people are in theory capable of joining the group, but not that the industry is conspiring to keep it small. If anything it's the people who have an academic history that stretches back to childhood that end up dependent on having someone to guide and grade them. Beating your own path through the wild is scary, uncertain, and often thankless, so I think you'd only want to do it if you already felt sure you were among the most motivated and dedicated members of a group.
I think the test is right: how long can you hold onto a single project so that you specialize more and more deeply? Every startup is an attempt to do exactly this, and most startups still fail.
The same should be true at every level of specialization. The more specific your needs are, the more likely one of the candidates is about as good as anyone in that specialty.
We all know that people in Africa work much much harder than your average western person, and yet they get dollars a day while you and me get 100x more.
Life isnt fair and to think that the best always win is plainly wrong, because we both know those poor people in Africa deserve far more than they get.
Some of the most miserable people I've known have been the hardest workers. One example: a friend of mine tried to start a freelance career, but had little experience in the field and rarely reflected on what his clients' needs were. He would work very hard to satisfy his own curiosity about their problems, eschewing deadlines and leaving little time to review his work before delivery. He was among the hardest-working people I've met, yet one of the least accomplished. No one would keep working with him for more than a month.
Correctly identifying which work needs to be done and how is more important than actually working hard. Sisyphean work is not virtuous, no matter how much effort is put forth.
I think more of an issue here is that there is just way too many SWEs and we can’t all be “elite.” In my 30 years in I have worked with roughly same percentage of “elite” as the post is alluding to. The history/structure of just about every project I worked on boils down to needing two distinct group of SWEs, the inovators and closers. The inovators are the “elite” (within the project) and they figure all the shit out. The closers crank it out once all the shit is figured out for them
And at least 50,000 software developers are absolutely convinced they are one of the 5,000.
This is a joke, not a number to base any calculation on, to start with.
> Look at the commit history of almost any important open source project and you'll see Lotka's curve, with a long tail of people who fixed a typo once and a few people who wrote the thing.
I am the guy that fixes just 2 lines. I was the only one that knew which to lines to change, it took me days to find (it has been like that for months).
> VP of Engineering
Yep. It checks. "Elite" is very subjective and it’s easy to take credit when someone else did the work. Some "Elite" engineers I met were really good, some were all talk and no bite but their managers would believe them fully. I really hope that he does not treat his employees based in this kind of bullshit thinking.
This is just plain dumb to make or present a statement like this.