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Comment by wehadfun | Hacker News Reader

The 10x engineer exist but not because he or she is so great but because they wrote the shitty code in the first place so it takes a new person 10x longer than the author to do anything.

the exponential cost thing is probably somewhat true. If the people who come up with the software actually knew what the fuck they wanted they would save the software from having to guess wrong and redo the code. Unless the software runs on a million dollar jet or something finding a bug during testing should not be 100x more then finding it during code. Infact I can make a decent argument that it is cheaper to pay a tester to find bugs then to waste an engineers time looking for them.

the software crises story about defence i think is real: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1

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I don't know why anyone down voted this because there's definitely at least some truth here. A lot of times the stereotypical 10x rock stars in an organization are really smart and productive people who ship features and move on to the next feature, leaving maintenance to the people who are left behind. They get the glory, but in many cases (totally anecdotal of course) they did it by taking all sorts of shortcuts and kludging things together in ways that aren't scalable or maintainable.

In this case, the 10x productivity boost comes from incurring technical debt that they personally will never have to deal with. Many organizations need these people in order to actually ship stuff, but their productivity comes at a cost that's paid for later, by other people. Maybe they're 10x up front, but it ends up being more like 1-2x when these costs are taken into account.

I'm more worried about the much more tangible 0.1x (or the feared but very real -1x) engineers, who exist in many organizations.

I downvoted it because people will go to any rhetorical lengths, including "un-defining" the very word intelligence to death, just to believe some people aren't more intelligent than others.

Oh, new rule! We can concede there are "10x" devs, but they have to write shit code! Give me a break.

Ok fine. I should not have called the orig developers code shit.

Fair enough.

But couldn't it be that those "real" 10x devs are so rare, that they aren't a "thing"?

With real I mean those who don't write shitty code.

I.e.: Let's explore every possible angle from which we could detract from the phenomenon. Leave no stone unturned!

By my count, I've worked with 6 of these mythical creatures at 3 jobs in 15 years. Is that rare? I don't think so. The fact is, in a lot of cases the team or even the entire company would not even exist as they did, without these people. And everyone knew it because it was blindingly obvious. What would id software have been without John Carmack? Did you know that the first version of Microsoft Math, which included a fully general algebra solver, was written by one guy as a side project? Nobody else on that whole team did anything like that. Just that guy. The 10x dev is the person all the other devs are intimidated by, strictly on the basis of the code they've written.

I know about guys like Carmack. He was the one I was thinking about when asking the question.

But I never met one like him.

To me, such people simply are far away in some big companys across the sea.

I always hope to meet such people to learn from them "how to do it".

They ARE a thing. Work for any large and successful software company and you'll find (or hear stories about) at least one. Look for the people that are consistently put on mission critical projects.

There are more types of extraordinary developers, but 10x is the only one I hear consistently mentioned.

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