Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

10x skills are everywhere.

My brother's car kept going into paroxysms where the engine would stutter and want to die, at random times. He'd pump the gas etc and it would go away.

Never happened when he was at the shop, so the guy said "If it does it and you're anywhere around, drive right in and show me!"

Kind of a long shot but what could he do? So one day it happened around 5 and he was close so he pulled in.

They shop guy listened a moment, said "don't do anything!" and ran and got a vise-grips. He shimmied underneath the car, clamped the fuel line. Waited until it almost died, then released.

The problem disappeared! It purred like a kitten.

"It's almost 5, I want to go home, but bring it in Monday and I'll take care of it."

"You have to explain that!"

"A piece of grit got into your needle valve (fuel rate control). Starving the engine made the valve fully open, and the grit passed through. I'll replace your fuel line and filter, problem should go away."

Important to note that in your example and in software engineering, the 10x "skill" is not something measurable by "output". The 10x myth is mired in the fallacy that a 10x'er can develop a product 10 times faster. Fred Brooks-esque principles are still constraining.

It's possible for someone to be 10 times more capable of diagnosing problems, but they don't fix 10 times as many cars.

The productivity difference in software engineering (tackling real-world projects) is vastly greater than 10X. We are flush with stories of teams that burn through huge sums and completely fail to deliver a working product. Delivery vs nondelivery is ∞X.

Knowing what to build, and just as importantly what not, is everything. From my experience PMs are not any better at this than engineers.

The big difference is that the Mechanic has to manually do that for every single customer, where a software 10xer identifies a crazy hard bug once and fixes it for all 10000 customers at once.

And that is where the finances come in. Why pay a 10x mechanic 300k/year if he is only going to generate 40k more in revenue than someone who would work for 90k/year. Where a 10x SRE/Cloud Operations person could actually save you 300k/year

And a person who designs cars can eliminate the flaw that caused the problem.

Mechanics would have to file tickets with the car design team :)

In software, we don't yet have a profession of Maintenance Engineers who can put up a shingle and strace/kernel debug opaque software experiences as a regular "practice."

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Upon reflection, I realize free and open-source software fills this slot in a sense.

If only the post you commented on mentioned a single word about compensation and comparison between IT or automotive industry..

It's the analogy. Also, your numbers sound entirely made up.

I would not hire SRE to save me 300k a year, I'd hire them to make me 600k a year.

900K a year or I walk!

> 10x skills are everywhere.

Yep. And as cognitive tasks become more challenging the distribution of ability actually widens.

As an extreme example, how much more productive was Andrew Wiles than the median mathematician at the task of proving Fermat’s last theorem? Pretty much infinitely more productive I would say…

Ya, this story is nonsense.

If this was actually relayed by a mechanic they were trying to get you to go away. It's more likely a story created by someone with a rudimentary idea how these things work who imagined it illustrated their point.

You know better than the person telling the story, I find that beyond amazing.

What I strive for my whole life is to develop this kind of telepathy which allows me to know events/skills better than people who actually lived them or developed them.

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