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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

And this is how you end up with an entire engineering team that has no idea what the hell is going on. Don't be a "10x engineer". Empower 10 other people around you. That's what the real 10x engineers are doing.

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When I joined my current company, I was the only software engineer working on embedded firmware (with plenty of help from folk with non-software backgrounds.) I had about a year and a half of frantic coding to set the foundation in place, and now almost 5 years in we have an embedded team of over a dozen people. I'm not particularly interested in management, and there has been no pressure for me to go that route, so I've successfully remained a leaf in the org chart. My current manager is the third person we hired to the embedded team, just a year or two out of school at the time, and he's doing an awesome job. I feel like I probably have a lot of political power within the organization, but I can't really say because I never need to use it. I'm lucky enough to generally like everyone I work with.

New folk in other parts of the company ask me what I do, and the best way I can describe it these days is meta-engineering. Rather than take long term ownership of any part of the system, I take temporary ownership of the scary parts that need the most attention, refactor them until they're as boring as I can using a suitably large sledgehammer, and then release them back into the wild to (hopefully never) be someone else's problem again. When I'm not doing that, entire weeks go by just reviewing coworkers' PRs, writing architecture documents, and interviewing job candidates. I'm widely known for bluntly (but hopefully respectfully) giving my opinion when weighing in on technical subjects I think I know about, and it seems to be well received. Pretty much all direct and indirect feedback I get is to keep doing that more. Many coworkers even send me their designs and PRs with an explicit request to mercilessly tear it apart.

I've been addicted to watching episodes of "Kitchen Nightmares" this past month, and I just realized that it's sorta like what I do at work, but with less swearing and the undercooked chicken is lack of regression test coverage. Also, the restaurant doors haven't closed up 6 months later yet!

I know exactly the archetype of engineer you’re talking about and they are hands down some of the most valuable engineers you’ll find.

It’s possible to have a 10x multiplier in “individual output” or whatever you want to call it, but 9 times out of 10 the most valuable engineer is the one who can provide detailed, actionable feedback on patches, architectural change proposals etc but is also willing to get their hands dirty when it makes sense. That, IMO, is what I consider a ‘true’ 10x engineer to be

It is not easy to find a team that wants to be "empowered" by a 10x engineer. Usually the 1x engineers focus on irrelevant or counterproductive issues, inundate the 10x with non-feasible suggestions and play office politics.

Upon which the 10x moves to inner emigration and gets work done. For which the "team" gets the credit.

Where are those teams that you speak of? At which companies?

My experience is different. True 10x engineers are always well received by their peers because they make the problems go away. However 10x wannabes... That's a different story entirely. They voice their opinion when not asked, want to take credit for everything, make dubious decisions outside their capabilities... Worst of all, eventually they move to "inner emigration" and create some monstrosity that nobody asked for, let alone wants to maintain. :shrug:

I've appreciated the culture and how it's evolved at Zipline over the past 5 years that I've been there. If you want to work on a UAV based medical delivery system, it's a pretty cool place.

If I weren't at Zipline, I'd probably be at Reliable Robotics, but that's more because I know the founders and lots of other employees there, and they have a strong team that's set up for success.

I'm biased towards robotics companies since I'm an embedded software engineer, though.

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