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Comment by fatman | Hacker News Reader

If I'm being generous, I'm a slightly above average engineer. Spot me 10X and I'll outperform any engineer on the planet. Do I believe in the 2X engineer? Definitely. 3X? Sure. 5X? Possibly, if their name is Ritchie or Torvalds or the like. But 10X? What I do in a week, they'd only get 4 hours. What I do in a year, they'd get 5 weeks. Doesn't exist.

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OK, so there is an 5x engineer relative to you, and you're above average. And on the other side of the bell curve, there is an 0.2x engineer. This makes relative difference of 25x from the worst to the best - bang - QED.

How are you measuring performance?

The 10x concept contains not only the work but the decisions. Not just how to build something, but what to build.

For example, people other than Linus Torvalds can code at the level needed to write and maintain git--as evidenced by the fact that other people do that now; he has handed the project off.

But the creation of git included the conception of git--the many decisions about what he would build, and why it should be that way. Those decisions, coupled with solid coding, have resulted in a massive productivity multiplier for many thousands of people.

The 10x "mythology" doesn't mean 10x productive as an above-average engineer. It means 10x productive as the least-productive.

So think of somebody who would consider you a 3x. Now the engineer who is 3x relative to you is just about 10x to them.

Now consider the developers with net-zero or net-negative productivity. The 10x rule wildly understates how much more valuable a good engineer is relative to them.

Then the mythology is worthless. The focus should then be on eliminating bad engineers, not to go chasing after unicorns. Or even more importantly, figure out why some "10X" become "0X", or vice versa.

Yes. Remember this whole thing started over 40 years ago, when management still had the mindset of large teams of factory workers and/or office paper pushers. Some were clearly better than others but for the most part, employees were supposed to be pin-compatible fully interchangeable parts, so the idea that some people could be lagging so far behind the others without management's notice was a new and novel concept. Today, not so much.

Brendan Eich wrote javascript in about a week. Could you write javascript in 10 weeks?

Fabrice Bellard wrote (among many things) a linux emulator in javascript. (http://bellard.org/jslinux/)

I don't know how long it took him to write, but knowing he's also doing other things (http://bellard.org/) including FFMPEG, I don't think he spent his entire career on it.

It's possible they can do things you can't do at all or can't do in a reasonable amount of time so 10x is certainly possible simply because they could have far superior knowledge.

I think the danger of the myth arrives from the idea that one can label some engineers as consistently 10X better than their peers, regardless of the actual tasks, personal lives, health, etc.

True, but honestly the 10x thing is only true because so many in the field are so bad that's it's not hard to do 10x more than they do. There are many copy/paste example and modify type programmers that can bang out work consistently yet do so very slowly and build very hard to maintain systems. Programmers who use virtually no abstraction and think it's fine to open a connection to the database and run some sql to get a result set and slap it on the screen and never once realize every method shouldn't duplicate the code to connect to the database and run some sql.

I think the issue is that you compare the 10x programmers to the average programmer. The original source say that you can see an order of magnitude of difference between a good and a poor programmer. Haven't you ever done in a week what a poor programmer took a month to (poorly) do?

I just finished reading the Mythical Man Month, and while it was certainly very good, the part of the book on 10X engineers struck me immediately as a gross oversimplification. Are there people that are 10X more productive than their worst peers? Absolutely. Are there people that are 10X more productive than the average peer? doubtful, or at least not consistently so, depending on their personal life and/or the nature of their workload.

The OP's opening "I was a 10x engineer for 7 months and then I was a 0x engineer for a year and a half." pretty much sums it up. I think many of us have at least felt to be in both places at different points in our lives. A "10Xer" can be loaded down with dreary (or extremely challenging) tasks that can send their "productivity" off a cliff. Either they burn out, or the nature of their work requires more "breakthroughs". If they are wise enough to refuse always saying yes to their bosses, they can become a wet blanket, which can also seemingly affect their perceived productivity.

I don't think the idea is that a 10x engineer doesn't do the same thing a 1x engineer does at 10 times the speed, I think the idea is that a 10x engineer delivers 10 times the value that a 1x engineer does (or the same value at 1/10 the cost.)

(IIRC seeing a study several years back which suggested a 10x increase in cost to address an issue for each step later in the "requirements -> development -> acceptance test -> production" sequence it was identified; even if that's not true in exact numbers, the basic trend of escalating costs is and a developer that, on a team, leads to the team doing substantially better at identifying problems up front might get the code they directly write through the process from requirements complete to ready to test at the same speed as other developers and still be a 10x developer.)

There is speed of execution but also speed in recognizing that some work can be avoided. It's hard to measure how much work is spared by taking the right decisions.

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