The Dirty Secret of 10x Engineers | Hacker News Reader

The Dirty Secret of 10x Engineers

erictang.org

24 pointsericxtang17 comments

Some people are just better at exploring problem spaces, avoiding dead ends and making insightful connections that lead to solutions. It doesn't always come with experience, some people could work forever and never solve even a moderately difficult problem. These people build websites. The 10x engineer has a mindset and an approach that yields results more consistently than his/her peers.

Very true. Engineers like that are extremely rare, and usually have serious golden handcuffs. However, there are a lot more people with similar mindset but limited programming experience. With the right culture, those are the usually the people who can make a big different at a startup.

The dirty secret of 10x engineers is that you have to learn to prevent the other crabs from dragging you back down into the bucket (whether deliberately or out of ignorance).

Crap workspace? Leave. Crap cohabitants (not just in need of assistance, but willfully negligent or so far behind that you can't get your job done)? Find better people to be around.

The hard part: If you're a nice person, it can take a while to really learn and internalize this, and it can remain difficult to execute.

It's not about being "better than". It's about circumstances that hinder your own performance and leave you counter-productively frustrated. No situation is perfect, but there are points past which they become destructively counter-productive.

It takes just one bad apple to spoil the entire team.

I've been in this situation three times. Reporting that your teammate is dragging the entire project down is a horrible feeling - but it's the only responsible thing to do. If you don't, you buy one person's peace of mind at the cost of the whole team's well-being.

PS. Dr Glover was right: nice guys are not nice. They just try to cover their asses and stay quiet.

You know why CRUD apps are called that? Because skilled developers know that once you have built a CRUD app a half dozen times, the work is simple and straightforward with no challenge. This work is called crud work because it is not very desirable by people who look for challenges.

On the other hand, it is easy to build these CRUD apps 10 times faster than a developer who has not learned all the ins and outs of such work. CRUD apps happen to be highly useful in most companies, i.e. there is a lot of market demand. Some people like this kind of work just like some people like to work on an assembly line. And it may even be worthwhile to pay someone a higher salary to churn out apps like this.

But that does not make someone a 10x engineer. It just means that they happen to be working in a 10x environment right now. Next year they may be struggling to keep up with iOS developers who are all on their 3rd iOS app.

My takeaway is that if a company really needs and wants 10x engineers, they should advertise the narrow details of the job that needs to be done and avoid listing irrelevant stuff like education and all the technologies involved. The ad should say something like Ruby on Rails for over 3 years with at least 10 apps built using MySQL backends.

But if you need someone who is creative, can adapt to change and new technology, has experience with certain generic technologies like async servers, then please say that in so many words. And pay them more than average.

Because the majority of developers are average developers and they share some characteristics. They have been working with more than one kind of technology. They are good at learning new things. They know how to adapt to new tools and new business requirements. They have used some stuff in the past, but because they have no desire to become 10x well-paid developers using that exact same set of technology, you should not be judging them by matching up lists of acronyms and names.

"Startups work on problems that have not been solved, and they are usually extremely challenging." - Web/mobile apps on average?

"We hire ridiculously intelligent people", another London company I know says "We only hire top 5% of candidates". The truth is both of you hire the best people out of the small subset that was interested enough to interview with you. Just like anyone else.

The general idea is true though :).

Companies that really hire the top 5% of candidates, never advertise open positions. At most, their careers page says that they accept applications at any time if you think that you fill the bill.

Most of their hires will come from reaching out to people and referrals.

The point is nobody hires the actual top 5% of the best people, just the subset that happens available and interested in them within given period.

top 5% is a very relative description. There is no hard measure, and everyone have a different standard on what they are "measuring in their head". Our perceptions are extremely biased by our own experiences. 90% of the time I really have to get to know the candidate before making any decisions. Of course the biggest constraint is available qualified candidates at the time. That's why hiring is so hard, and people who are really good at it tend to be veterans who have been in the industry for a long time.

There's nothing dirty about shipping.

10x means shipping - and nothing else. It's just one trait - being able to attack small chunks of work and finish them before moving to the next one - and it doesn't say anything about the quality of one's work. Here's why: you can learn to ship.

Being a "10x" is half of Joel's "smart and get things done". Don't ever forget about the other half.

The thesis is that everyone is a 10x engineer at certain moments. But that if that same person is put in a more challenging situation, they no longer will be 10x. Also, that's the situation they should consistently be in. Otherwise, a consistently 10x engineer indicates coasting.

It's a workable hypothesis, but where is the data?

The dirty secret of the blog-o-sphere.

The dirty secret of all science. People only study things that someone will pay for. And often the questions that you or I would like to see answered never attract funding. Recently someone discovered that booth babes do not work as a marketing tool by spending their own company's money on some experiments. Unfortunately this kind of thing is rare in the public eye.

Some people think that Google has done such studies but they are part of its secret sauce.

I've heard Google has a special process, unfortunately even if they make it public, it would only help startups in a very limited scope. The hiring requires are different, especially when it comes to a lot of the "soft skills".

If a '10x' engineer is going ten times slower than a normal and is therefore not a '10x' engineer anymore, wouldn't a '1x' engineer on the same difficult problem also go ten times slower and be a '0.1x' engineer?

Take as given that under condition X all people can exhibit Y behavior. It does not necessarily follow that a particular person can exhibit Y behavior only under condition X.

10x engineers wouldn't read this because they're busy doing something

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