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Comment by whatever_dude | Hacker News Reader

IMO a 10x engineer is, more often than not, just a well-positioned engineer - the right person at the right place and right time.

Someone working within their field of expertise, with the tools to get it done, and without the typical roadblocks that stand in the way. Hopefully you've been there and know how it feels.

And maybe you've also been at the other side of the spectrum, working with an ever-changing, badly designed and documented piece of technology, with many surprise problems biting you in the ass, ever changing goals, and bad management decisions.

I've been a 10x engineer at times. But I know I've also been a 0.5x engineer. The knowledge on how to solve a problem and how to find an answer doesn't change, but the perceived throughput of a person definitely does.

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Same here. I have worked on projects where we had a very good understanding of where we wanted to go and had autonomy to make the right decisions. We cranked out a product in 6 months the company is still living off 15 years later. That was with 3 people who could be rated as 10x for this project.

And I have worked on projects where nobody knew where things should go but a lot of people had a say in what not to do. So we all ended performing at 0.1x.

Agreed, there are no 10x engineers, we all have 10x moments in time once in a while. We all have moments when we feel we can't tie our own shoelaces without help.

Of course there are outliers. Nobody disputes that Jordan was a 10x basketball player (probably closer to 100x when compared against the true mean and not just among professional players). Nobody disputes that Coltrane was a 10x jazz musician. Why would software be unique among all fields by not having any outliers?

You're talking about exceptional geniuses, of which there are maybe a few dozen in a given field across an entire generation of people.

Every two-bit company is demanding "10x engineers". That is what doesn't exist. There are not tens of thousands of genius software developers in the world.

I think this is the problem, and my main concern with the overuse of "10x engineer": they don't live in a vacuum.

If you hire a 10x engineer and get him to move a button two pixels left, and then tomorrow someone else tell him to move the button two pixels right, he won't be a 10x engineer, he'll be a 0x engineer. There's a lot more involved and it compounds. An engineer knowing what to do and what not do (a skill often overlooked) can help immensely, but everyone needs plenty of support to be at their 10x.

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