“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor.
It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the rest of your life, and working "extreme" hours is both a bad policy and a bad sign that the system you're operating in is brittle. Nothing that we do is so unique that another competent engineer shouldn't be able to fill in for you when you are having an off day.
The effect of consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time trumps any number of crunch weeks and burnout episodes, to an almost absurd degree.
The sooner the software engineering field can be rid of its beliefs about the inherent brilliance of programmers, the better for everyone involved. Inlcuding software engineers!
From my life experience, the claimed statement actually does have some truth in it: software engineers experience a lot more bullshit marketing than other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking, thus they, in my experience, have indeed become more immune to exaggerated marketing claims.
Also it fits my experience that software engineers are much more vocal about calling out bullshit (just consider the "bullshit bingo" game) than other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking, thus based on the audience reactions alone, any salesman would likely indeed come to the conclusion that software engineers are the most skeptical audience.
Didn't we pass the rubicon on that in the early 2010s? I personally don't feel that its "like" finance but that its the exact same behaviors from the exact same set of people.
Once tech stopped being a bunch of nerds in a basement and started being a source of wealth and power, it attracted a whole slew of intelligent and wealth seeking individuals who would have gone to wall street previously. Its not like the math skills don't have a heavy overlap already.
And well, now that they're here, we see all the same power games being played with the same results
For example EE used to be prestige and CS was the backup. And that would never compare to finance or law.
These are the new bloods that gifted us with surveillance tech, btw.
Andreessen, Scott McNealy, & Ellison were, to me, the ones that left a particularly bad taste.
Now the people entering the industry by and large see it as a game of wealth acquisition similar to finance or big law, and big tech is adapting in a similar way -- high salaries, insanely bad wlb, politics far exceeding any other skill as a determiner of career progression.
For a while, if you knew how to type into a text editor, you were hired as a "webmaster." Lots of people made a lot of money, writing awful stuff.
If there's money to be made, people will pour in. They aren't necessarily bad folks, and many of them are skilled, and willing to work hard, so the trope of "thousands of terrible engineers" is maybe not that accurate.
However, I kind of despair at the management skills of the folks that run the teams, and the decision-makers that set the bar.
But the story is correct. Teams need cohesion, a lot more than rockstars. We can do together, what I can't do alone.
At some point the wheeling and dealing, snake oil, corporate backstabby like people that many associate with finance were actually high schoolers at some point who had to pick where they went in life. The ones who only care about wealth and power, only care about wealth and power, so if software was a good route to that theyll put on their software face and do that job. Before software made a lot of money for people, finance was the default
You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.
Of course, there were always some of all of these people in the industry, but the balance shifted dramatically during the last couple booms, tracking the atypically high compensation standards set by FAANG's since 2010 or so.
Also money is nice.
You never write code in a vacuum do you? You always have some kind of goal.
https://swizec.com/blog/lolcodetojavascript-compiler-babel-m...
It was pretty fun.
Also this other time I wrote a nodejs script to keep my computer at a specific temperature because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots.
https://swizec.com/blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favori...
> because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots.
> You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.
As a reminder: Bill Gates, who is certainly old school tech, was born and raised in an objectively wealthy, well-connected family, then went to Harvard. This is nearly made-for-TV silver spoon stuff.
The original focus of this thread was on technical precision vs. market efficiency, and how quality was sacrificed for faster conversion to sales.
That shift compromises products for everyone by creating a race to the bottom toward the minimum viable product and safety standards. When the consequences eventually hit, the aggregate responsibility and emergent effects lose direct attribution...but they exist all the same.
The most salient values of the later cohort are different than those in the prior ones, and those values do track with the values we associate with those different class backgrounds.
But there's no ranking being made there. They're just different values.
The values of the new cohort have earned the industry a great deal of political, economic, and cultural influence on an international level.
The values of the old cohort didn't do that, except insofar as they built a stage for the new one. They made software differently. They designed products differently. They operated businesses on different scales. They hired differently.
Indeed some of us from the old cohort don't personally savor all the spotlight and influence and cultural drama that Silicon Valley collectively bears now, and miss the way thing were. And others love it. But that's just personal preference, not class warfare.
To be fair, I don't see any value judgements in the post you're replying to. He doesn't say if it's a good or bad thing, it's just a thing. But what I think this means is that field became more popular, entry filters became more competitive, and families with less resources to invest in their offspring became filtered out.
There's nothing good or bad about it.
I'm only a little younger than Gates, and it seemed like, what else would you do? PCs were revolutionizing the world.
For about a decade I worked as an engineer in a field where the expectation (at least starting) was that metal gets cut, stuff gets built, and there's physical hardware.
Those existed. May have actually had more hardware interaction than many in engineering. Yet much of the day to day rapidly became computer simulations of the metal that might get cut someday.
In many fields, the organizational choice decrement on anything involving capital expenditure or purchase was so severe that usually the obvious choice was to run a computer model, and simulate what might occur. What else would you do?
Boy is this true. I don’t think we ever recovered. Imagine trying to start a capital intensive business like mining in 2025.
Even for the folks that have an ecological focus, there's quite a few methods developed with limited degradation of the landscape, and reclamation of the mining sites into alternative uses (park, forestry, entertainment, tourism). The Wieliczka saltmine in Poland's an especially impressive example [1]
[1] https://www.wieliczka-saltmine.com/individual-tourist/touris...
And these days, there's also a huge number of resources in terms of mineral identification and site mapping. The EMIT Imaging Spectrometer from NASA's a cool example that does remote satelite mineral identification from orbit. [2]
I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation.
I'm not that old, but I've been around long enough to hear people of every age over about 30 claim that everything was better back in their day until the new generation came along and ruined it.
And they’d probably be right!
I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge.
Quantitative differences can create qualitative differences and I don’t think it’s surprising that we’re in a different age of software engineering than we were 10-15 years ago for any given X year
Then suddenly single threaded speedups didn’t happen anymore (and people realized even though cpu speeds had grown, it was not directly related to Moore’s law).
Ofc your rationale used Moore’s law correctly while the ”cpu infinite speed growth rah rah rah” peoples didn’t.
>FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory > 1: node::Abort() [/usr/bin/node]
Is what made me decide it might finally be worth the time to actually learn how memory worked
And that's why all applications are laggy as shit these days.
But ignore memory at your peril. I have one proj that has a 256GB instance. For a fairly boring CRUD app. I am asking a lot of questions as apparently we are having the yearly 'we need more memory' questions. Things that are leading to speedups. Just by using less memory. At the bottom of that stack is a L1 cache with less than a hundred KB. It doesnt matter right up until it does. I have seen huge 300+ item string classes that needed maybe 10 of the fields. They threw it in 'just because there is enough'. Yet something has to fill in those fields. Something has to generate all the code for those fields. The memory mangers have to keep track of all of that junk. Oh and all of that is in a pipeline of a cascade of applications so that 300+ class is copied 10 times. Plus the cost to keep it on disk and shove it thru the network.
People that stopped running tests because they were configured to make 10,000 API calls in one minutes and it crippled the app until everything was restarted.
"Add some more memory to your database instance....poof"
Honestly, I think so much of this comes from the belief of needing to move fast because. Because why? That would require direction. I think the money motivation is motivating speed but we've lost a lot of vision. Moving fast is great for learning but when you break things you got to clean it up. The problem is that once these tech giants formed they continued to act like a scrappy developer. To not go back and fix all the mess because we gotta go fast, we gotta go forward. But with no real vision forward. And you can't have that vision unless you understand the failures. We have so many low hanging fruits that I can't figure out why they aren't being solved. From deduplicating calendar entries, automatically turning off captioning on videos when a video has embedded captioning so you don't just overlay text on top of text, searching email, or even setting defaults to entry fields based on the browser data (e.g. if you ask for user's country, put the one the browser is telling you at the top of the fucking list!). These are all things I think you would think about if you were working in a space where you needed to consider optimization, if you were resource constrained. But we don't and so we let it slide. But the issue is a death by a thousand cuts. It isn't so bad in a few cases but these things add up. And the great irony of it all is that scale is what has made tech so powerful and wealthy in the first place. But no one stops to ask if we're also scaling up shit. If you printing gold but 1% of your gold is shit, you're still making a ton of shit. The little things matter because the little things add up. You're forced to deal with that when you think about memory management but now we just don't
Well that and this is a forum for a lot of tech people which means a good number of software engineers here.
The way I see it, it's like 'swatcoder and 'lovich said upthread: the field became a money printer, and attracted - not revealed, attracted - a different kind of people, with a different mindset. I too saw this change happening. Applicant pool size? That's a spurious correlation - it's just driven by the same factors that make software industry a money printer.
You have just written down a partial solution to this dilemma: make these high-paying jobs less attractive in terms of status for these wealthy families. :-)
For instance I was a CS undergrad in the mid/late-90s. There was an enormous difference demographically between my incoming freshman class and the incoming freshman class by the time I graduated. And the talking points were exactly the same ones we see in this thread.
2. I agree that unions are useful, and you’re starting to see them (eg Alphabet Workers Union). There is definitely opportunity here.
3. I think your visions of non-grandeur are blinding you to the possibilities that others live life and advocate for themselves differently, without it being wrong. Sometimes change is ok and sometimes people being different from you and your beliefs is ok.
While I do think unions are important, Silicon Valley engineers are responding in-kind to their fungibility. It’s pretty common to see people jump around every few years, chasing opportunities instead of loyalty. Usually collecting a pay bump. It’s generally not looked down upon in hiring, because it’s increasingly normal, and the extra pay and corresponding savings protects against periods of unemployment. Regardless of people’s thoughts on the practice, “resume driven development” grew as a reaction to the fungibility - forcing their own self-growth upon a disloyal employer.
Big urban areas with lots of job opportunities are difference employment environments, and employee’s actions of self protection evolved differently. Is there room for learning? Always. But this entire comment seems to pass judgement upon a world that frankly doesn’t exist.
As a Bay Area resident who once lived in the Midwest, I can confidently say that people on the coast don’t have such a negative view of “corn lands” - this narrative is very much self imposed.
You could have an indoor pool in a detached building. You could keep horses. You could have a 6 car garage. All the upgrades from the builder too. All for a song in comparison to a home a fraction of all that in the bay. I mean just start looking on zillow between these sorts of homes in say indiana or ohio and it is absurd the difference in cost of living. How much you'd have to pay to rent a tiny old boat on lake tahoe for the day vs buying a boat outright and even paying to winterize and store it in a yacht club on a great lake. SF country club fees vs midwest, literally exclusive fuck you old money rates vs only a couple thousand initiation fee for the same sort of course conditions and probably a nicer appointed newer constructed clubhouse in the midwest. Same is true for the private schools too, the nicest ones nationally recognized in the area can only charge so much because there's just so many people with kids and wealth in the private school market so they aren't absolutely stupid like in the bay. Even the public schools go up to bat with those in some districts.
I don't think "the data" you might cite are considering all of these factors of the lived experience. Maybe one or two economic indicators but not how life actually plays out with even the half dozen or so things I've laid out above.
But that is blatantly not wealth? For a topic so humorously numerical, this entire comment is decided not.
> You want actual property, with some setbacking from your neigbors
First, not everyone wants these things, and even quality-of-life is not one size fits all. Second, this is also not what wealth is.
> You could have an indoor pool in a detached building. You could keep horses. You could have a 6 car garage. All the upgrades from the builder too. All for a song in comparison to a home a fraction of all that in the bay.
Uh, duh the midwest is cheaper than the most economically productive region in human history. Thanks for explaining.
As an ex-Cleveland resident who now lives in San Francisco, I can confidently say that these trappings are not available to most midwesterners nor Californians; neither tradesmen not high skill workers; and its also still not wealth, although it is certainly more closely correlated.
Anecdotally, you couldn't pay me to own a horse, nor do I even have use for my single car - owning 6 seems like a waste when on-demand self-driving vehicles will shuttle me effortlessly around San Francisco.
> I don't think "the data" you might cite are considering all of these factors of the lived experience
Because that's not what the words in this conversation mean.
> Maybe one or two economic indicators
That's what these it means. And they're not in the favor of a tradesman in the midwest.
> not how life actually plays out with even the half dozen or so things I've laid out above.
But what you laid out (quite condescendingly btw) is farcically not the meaning of wealth, and not the indicators of a good quality of life. I can name a long list of things that the midwest can't provide to the wealthy that are readily available to working class people in California (eg. an extra 100 days of sunlight a year). But I won't because it's obvious and not the definition of wealth.
this happened "in the early 2010s"? I don't think so. Software engineers have no power, and in comparison to finance, quite limited wealth.
Sort of tracks with the Welchian bullshit he seems to have supported as CEO.
I have no doubt they would fail their current interview cycle for engineers if they tried it under a pseudonym, they were considered software engineers when they started their companies and that cohort is now in charge of a double digit percentage of the planets wealth.
If you think software engineers have no power and limited wealth compared to finance then I can only imagine you are not a software engineer are are downplaying the amount of power the class has absorbed, or we fundamentally disagree on what a software engineer is
Like that fellow who runs a car company now
Amount of toxic behavior in nerdy groups is just as high as finance.
Every single one just thinks how smart he is and how to one up the other.
Technical interviews were always bad even before 2010 as there was loads of gatekeeping anyway.
Accountants have the same bullshit memes we do.
The 787 did something Boeing vowed they would never ever do. They let Mitsubishi build the wings of the 787. They’ve never let a supplier do that. The wings are the heart of the airplane. I am completely amazed that Mitsubishi never progressed past commuter jets after that project (and I believe they shut that division down about 5-10 years ago). Just unfathomably dumb.
I don’t know what we in software need to learn from this. I don’t think being meaner makes anything better, but maybe more assertive is the answer.
Focus is a supper power. Not getting diverted with trivial shit. Don't get distracted , avoid creating more work for yourself and others. Todays me would find yesterdays me a -10X annoyance.
No we won’t do that, but we can do this. Or that is trickier than it sounds but we will think about it until it makes sense.
I think that the idea of having people (at startups) working at a frenetic pace is because
1. The VC money is running low 2. Being first to market used to be a major determining factor on whether the product would succeed or fail
One time I worked so many hours I lost vision (temporarily) in my eye - called cotton wool spots. I was a generally healthy younger guy. Working this way has health effects. If in fact there is such a thing as 10x engineer - how long do you think you will stay 10X once your health deteriorates. Just my 2 cents.
A null engineer is an inf engineer.
this is crucial. from my own productivity I know that I can function at 1X or 10X depending on my focus.
being a great engineer requires practice most of all, and the consistency of focus during that practice will impact its value.
in my experience, engineering is all about efficiency, and as i have developed over time the scope of factors i take into account when calculating the efficiency of something has increased. in the beginning i only looked at the technical details of the implementation, and then over time that expanded to considering maintainability, team co-ordination, business objectives, etc.
the potential scope here is unlimited. when you start, just making something compile takes all of your focus, but over time as programming becomes reflexive you are able to expand the factors you take into account far beyond the immediate code, and it seems trivial by comparison.
See, that’s a problem.
Engineering is all about effectiveness. Not efficiency.
Focus is great for slamming out a bunch of code that everybody else hates and has to tiptoe around you about because focus also made you so goddamned proud of your monster. Slow down and check the signposts before following your good intentions all the way to the end.
What would a 10x engineer do at any of these companies pushing bloat in their products? How do you keep the software clean even as it becomes successful, millions of dollars and jobs change the ethos of your organization, but you are tasked with preser ving.
A 10x engineer at msft would have avoided notepad being modified.
A 10x engineer knows how to stop the forces that be, from adding an "ai" feature, where it clearly doesn't belong.
This is not a 10X programmer. A 10X programmer delivers the same amount of functionality in 1/10 the time.
For me the first 10x programmer that comes to mind is Peter Norvig. This spell checker he wrote in a single flight remains a work of art:
https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
Very few programmers would come up with something so concise and elegant yet powerful in such a short amount of time.
I guess it’s worth pointing out that he does support one of the arguments the article makes:
> But they didn't, and come to think of it, why should they know about something so far outisde their specialty?
So yeah, he’s implicitly saying, “I have a lot of domain knowledge here.”
But that said: wow, that code is so concise and elegant, it gives me tingles. If anyone IS a 10x engineer, it’d surely have to be Norvig.
Yeah, he was at Google at the time (https://norvig.com/resume.html) so he was probably involved in the original development of the thing he was making a demo of.
He's definitely smarter than me with that CV but this particular project doesn't seem like some insane productivity achievement.
Writing and debugging production code is a different skill set. Finding the optimal algorithm is useful but not the same as releasing it into the wild which may require maintaining backwards compatibility, work arounds for bugs in other code or hardware bugs that can no longer be fixed at the foundry - the list goes on.
The vast majority of work programmers do 10X or otherwise is not greenfield where you get to pick the programming language you have 10K hours of experience using, the best hardware or an unlimited budget of money and time.
Now I would consider Dr Norvig a 10X educator. That program demonstrates how a decent knowledge of algorithms and math can take a relatively complex problem and make it tractable.
Uncle Bob tried and failed to use his own strategy of many small functions to solve sudoku. There’s been a lot of Trough of Disillusionment talk about him lately. My impression of him is that he’s got the right code organization idea but for the wrong reasons, and so his ends often don’t justify his means. It’s a common pattern in software to guess the wrong reasons why something works, and then overfitting to the wrong reasons.
You are part of the toxic culture until you realized that was that it is overall counterproductive. Collectively we software developers are to blame and no one else.
It took you 4 times as long to bring value to the company, you had lot of enthusiasm but were not using it right.
Being a kX (k > 1) means that you need to work fewer hours to accomplish the same amount as an average developer. If you then got to spend more time to fix your stuff, that counts against your time budget.
If I’d had this perspective the day before I would have been finished before 5. But I got wrapped up in thinking I was close and I should have stopped for air.
All other engineering disciplines are ultimately limited to building things in (at most) 3 euclidean dimensions. There is only so much junk you can hide in a finite volume of space.
Code by comparison lives in hyperbolic space [0] and you can hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious. This is exemplified by the unpleasant discovery all of us have had of a supposedly peripheral folder holding source code called all over the code base and the near impossibility of moving it in a location that makes sense for it without having to refactor the whole code base.
People, including myself, have a seriously bad intuition just how much volume there is in a space which grows at least exponentially.
The closest discipline to software engineering is mathematics and that has an even worse track record. There's the folklore about half of all math papers giving the wrong proof for the right conclusion. By comparison software engineering only gets catastrophic bugs less than every other time a program is run.
[0] All trees are natively embedded in some hyperbolic space of whatever curvature matches the average number of children per node, and all code can be ultimately represented as a tree.
However, at the end of the day, there is an input and output and compute and memory needed to run the thing and if we look at that we realize, we never actually left the bounded physical realm and we can still engineer software systems against real world constraints. We can judge its efficiency and breaking points.
What's very different is the cost to change the system to do something new and that's where this unbounded complexity blows up in our face.
This is a common sense view of computation that's unfortunately wrong.
The simplest counter example is the busy beaver program: with as little as 12 states we have saturated the computational capabilities of the universe, but it looks completely safe and sane for the first few states you would be testing against.
You may call it pathological, and you'd be right, but the point is that you never know under which rug a function that takes more computation than the universe can supply is hiding.
By comparison power electronics engineers don't have to formally prove that they didn't accidentally include a nuclear power plant in their e-scooter design.
If on the other hand you're speaking of the theoretical computational needs of the program you just wrote, then your earlier dismissal of mathematics and its "even worse track record" is all the sillier.
If I was designing a software system, I could introduce a time constraint. An imagined conversation: "How long will it take to get an answer? Between half a second and the heat death of the universe. OK. Can we just issue a timeout error after 1 second?"
This is putting controls in place so the system doesn't exceed its constraints and although hypothetical it might be able to do a job for any input, it can't because we haven't been able to find a more efficient solution for certain known and unknown scenarios.
What makes software unique to other engineering disciplines is that it isn't a discipline at all. What makes software so great is how quick the iteration cycles are.
Software sits at a higher abstraction level than physical hardware, so much of our time is spent throwing at the wall and seeing what sticks because that's often (although not always) the best use of time.
It's also my experience that a few well written integration tests are more useful and catch more actual bugs than a million unit tests. This is especially true of web apps which are inherently highly stateful.
The most powerful design paradigm I have ever found is to spend the first, say, 10-20% of my time making a rough prototype. Not with an eye of actually using a single line of it (although it happens) but just to do the quickest and dirtiest possible exploration of what the actual problem is.
you mean concerns that should be seperated but they did it in a wrong way?
These days you are hard pressed to find a language that uses dynamic scoping as the default.
The needle likes to swing back and forth between dynamic be static typing but we definitely seem to be coming back to static typing again
patients = 400
x = pat / 2
This joke is like a decade old at this point https://xkcd.com/1172/
Namely, what does the following code do?
patients = 400
patents = 20
x = patients / 10
“Doing something” is the beginning of how to describe the actual truth of what some actions causes in relation to its affect on reality.
“Supporting something” has literally nothing to do with reality beyond what’s necessary to support a brain that can _intend_ a result or action regardless of what actually happens.
I linked the xkcd comic because the behavior described by the developer in the comic met the criteria for “doing something” but it didn’t meet the criteria for “supporting something” because the behavior of the software was not what the developer intended.
Back in my EE days in 90's, "full stack engineer" meant, for example, being able to build a physical calculator by connecting a numerical keyboard, bunch of 7 segment displays and a micro controller using bunch of wires on a circuit board, and THEN writing the assembly code to allocate memory and run your program in an infinite loop. You had to erase your EPROM with UV and burn your program to the chip over and over every time you changed a byte in your code. Debugging? You wish.
As a side effect, full stack engineers had the risk of getting electrocuted, or going blind :)
Which, indeed, is different from engineering where constraints are non-negotiable, and thus the methodology as well.
I think a lot of people doing functional programming, as an example, enjoy the constraints and the discipline that it imbues on their craft.
The _need_ to build higher-level abstractions to manage the complexity or verboseness required to do things from lower level components always seems to be fighting with the _desire_ to build your own higher-level abstractions that fit your own view of how things 'should be', despite many of the decisions going into this being abstract and not easily objectively measurable.
On top of that, software components as 'reusable boxes' only seems to work up to a certain level. The idea seems to be that higher-level abstractions and reusable pieces are all nicely shaped square boxes that all perfectly fit inside other boxes, but the reality seems to be more that even the best reusable boxes aren't perfectly square, have weird edges, and themselves have to fit into larger non-square shapes with weird edges.
And what are the weird sharp edges? Decisions that had to be made about solving a problem. Every higher-level software component is on some level a set of (mostly arbitrary, sometimes measured) decisions about how to take a set of lower level generic components and make something more specific with them. Libraries might assume a certain structure but leave choices for how they're composed to the user. Applications make many more decisions about how their components are used in order to provide a more specific tool. There is a move from genericity to specificity as you move up layers of components.
And finally, software requirements change all the time, but the need to change is itself at odds with the requirement that problems are solved only by making hundreds of decisions that have to work together for a working solution but also may be difficult to undo.
> the constraints and the discipline that it imbues on their craft.
Perhaps the constraints and discipline here comes from a desire to move towards some kind of standard or expected way of structuring software, knowing from experience that the cognitive cost of making (and sometimes having to read and understand) all the arbitrary decisions mentioned above is actually quite high. (This itself also leads to the notion of 'best practices' which seemingly change too often to ever really be considered best).
except that's not really true. The big difference is that to negotiating the constraints when it comes to (physical) engineering, one of the biggest factors is money (and lots of it). "Well, we could double the span but for that you'll need to have parts A1, D5 and T3 built out of ..."
Software development isn't free, but it doesn't typically incur doubling of costs for tweaks to the feature list (and I do mean tweaks).
Then marketing come along and ask to make it a trilogy and a few weeks before release they ask you to add in Ewoks because it'll sell more toys.
Different jurisdictions have different tax rates.
Where did I say that? There are definitely people who straight up break the relevant laws and don't pay their taxes.
Of course, whether someone breaks a law or not, is an issue independent of 'fairness'. But I don't know what you mean by 'fair'.
Eh, you can also create a bijection between all programs and the natural numbers, so I don't think this analogy gives much insight. It's also silly to think that structural engineers or whatever only have to worry about where to place indistinguishable cubes in 3d space at a single moment in time and move on to the next job.
This honestly comes off as the kind of masturbatory rhetoric the GP seemed to be talking about.
Let's take a made up example of a structural engineer designing a building. As another comment mentioned, in theory the design space here is enormous. Just the concrete mix can be endlessly optimized. But here there's a large monetary cost tradeoff that's obvious to everyone involved. Say an overenthusiastic junior proposes attempting to rediscover ancient Roman concrete mix for this project. Everyone from the other engineers to management can call that out as absurd.
In theory you can make the building out of anything. But in practice the economics of producing real world components only allows for a few choices in each stage of the design.
Meanwhile, software components are essentially free, especially if they're open source. Just clone the repo, hook up the code and you're done, right? So surprisingly often, the overenthusiastic junior can convince the whole company to build the new feature with some obscure framework that'll be unsupported in a few years. And no one can reliably call them out, because there's no easy, objective way to measure something like tech debt. (Another compounding problem is the rapid growth of the software field. Juniors are minted faster than they can be trained.)
To make the software example more concrete: there's an internal config language "blub" in one of the FAANGs that someone designed in two months. It looked simple, gained a lot of adoption quickly. Fast forward 5 years, and it turns out using blub was a big mistake. It scales terribly, the semantics were badly thought out and cause subtle bugs everywhere. But here's the kicker: there are now millions of lines of blub. Over the next decade, the company makes several very expensive attempts to replace blub and fails. Blub continues to underpin their production infra to this day.
So to sum up, I think maybe the core issue is not so much "3d space versus hyperbolic space". If you view the space as the tree of decisions you need to make to reach the goal, all engineers are working in hyperbolic space.
However, when designing real world things, economics rapidly culls the design tree. Buying materials requires cash up front. But in software it's often the opposite: you get the libraries "for free", and the unmeasurable tech debt accrues over time.
Exactly like sticking with blub, which was only chosen because of historical accident, but they're stuck with it because it would cost too much to stop all progress while refactoring everything to work around it.
You're arguing a matter of degree while asserting a matter of kind.
And the point is still ridiculous with the explicit comparison to maths, which is somehow different because there exists wrong proofs.
Trying to diminish engineering disciplines that have existed for millennia by imposing an arbitrary constraint of "3 euclidean" is pretty wank. Let's drop silly constraints.
Do you have any idea how complicated concrete is? It's just sand, aggregate, cement and water. Exothermic reaction. Job done.
Let's look at wood ... the stuff is a bundle of fibres and stuff and yet we build huge structures out of it. Who on earth knows how or why plywood works? Britain had several all wooden aircraft during WWII - the Mosquito was so good that Herman Goering declared that it was worth two kills.
Steel - its just iron with other stuff.
Software engineering is growing up gradually but please don't be a dick towards people who practice disciplines that invented things and concepts you rely on and live within.
For example the concept of a token that allows you to do something exclusively - " exclusive lock" - was popularised by early railways. A single track should have only one train on it and after a few accidents the idea of an exclusive token was "invented" that could be passed across to the next exclusive user.
When you say hyperbolic, you should be aware of how close that is to hyperbole.
The point is that all other engineering disciplines don't have enough design space to make a true mess of their projects. Software by comparison hasn't been limited in its design space since the first super computers started having gigabytes of ram memory in the late 1980s.
That doesn't mean that either discipline is better or worse, it means they are different. Other than math there is no other field which has as much freedom when it comes to basic design choices as software engineering, and math proofs are even more of a mess than software programs, to the point that pretty much every non-formally verified proof is wrong in some way.
Or to put another way: would railways be more or less complex if we allowed them to be embedded in a higher dimensional space instead of being essentially a 2d network on the earth surface? If you don't think so I'd like you to think about what a train schedule would look like on hyper graphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraph
Every discipline has infinite depth.
Railways in 2D may seem simple but there the simplicity may be intentional. Just like when you write software that runs things like planes, trains, or medical devices, all of a sudden you’re writing in C, without recursion, without function pointers, without using the heap, etc.
Look at the concord airplane. A mess of a project.
Look at anything in biology and human health. The complexity is unimaginable compared to software.
Edit: reduced emotions
Since I want programming to be inclusive and not have a bad rap publicly, when a peer says “software is better than all other disciplines because of X, Y, Z” I want to convince them otherwise.
As a leader and teacher with more grey hair every day, I feel this responsibility
You should probably do less of that since:
1). That's not what any of my posts said.
2). My degree says mathematical physics and not computer science or software engineering.
3). A field where you're tone policed by the tone deaf is the opposite of welcoming and inclusive.
U/callc appears to be reacting to the public perception of how this thread would read externally, you appear to be reacting based on hard logic, which is unpalatable to most of the public.
I think you two are talking past each other
This is why steelmanning a comment before arguing against it should be a rule.
Based on your comment I’m interpreting “special” as “better”, or “harder”.
I interpreted the comment you replying to as software is “special” as in it is “different” and the differences require different solutions than other fields have.
Like when I talk to my civil engineer friends I only on the surface comprehend what they are dealing with when they need to move literal thousands of tons of mass. I can try and make an analogy to my own experience with bandwidth and memory, but nothing will be a 1:1 comparison with the amount of energy used when the physical mass of the entire internet is within an order of magnitude of a strawberry.
Simultaneously my civil engineers friends don’t have to deal with a situation of one of their apprentices making a logical mistake based on a single missed `!` and their features suddenly using up 100% of all resources everywhere
Any type of physical engineering is based on hard facts, data, and well established historical research, mathematics, and more.
I've seen many an electrical engineer say, "fuck it, this is too hard and pays too little" and so they pivoted into software engineering quite easily.
On the other hand I've never seen the opposite. Real engineering is hard because you actually have to get shit perfect. The wrong o rings and real people die.
There are a few real software engineering shops and real software engineers, but 90% are just slinging shit together for a bunch of enterprise CRUD and they are all just one bad deploy away from disaster.
I read it as: “software is special because its design space is high dimensional, compared to all other engineering disciplines which are limited to 3 spatial dimensions. Large design space leads to ability to mess things up.”
I wholeheartedly agree with you: “real” engineering (where lives are on the line) is hard. Most software that is made is not to control pace makers, air plane autopilot, space shuttles, etc. When we do need to program in these life and death situations, we should look carefully at the real engineers that do this all the time (looking at you self-driving car software).
Engineering with constraints builds discipline. Maybe we are lacking as engineers in software because the constraint bar just continues to raise.
We could always talk about stacks, AVL trees, or NLP before any meaningful conception of computers, and indeed a lot of computer science research happened when computers were still fairly primitive. Computer science and its applied form, software engineering, are about computation (data and code) and abstraction. Even computation is just a distraction at some level. There's some world with the ideal behavior that a program should abstract from, but an ideal is an ideal, so programming is often floundering to figure out what ad-hoc world the program mirrors and tweaking haphazardly. Software engineering isn't engineering not because it can't be, due to the (very real) differences of software from the physical world. It isn't engineering currently because we aren't taking control of our actions and their consequences, in all senses.
Intellectual superiority is not relevant here. Everyone has hard tasks. If you're a civil engineer, then design and build infrastructure well. If you're a programmer, then design and build programs well. Any discipline demands honesty and forthrightness in evaluating its work.
I totally agree with their post and get what they're saying.
Within circuits (big or small) it is possible to do some crazy stupid shit, but reality kicks in much sooner. Either because of physics or price.
Analog circuits (my specialty) are a perfect example of this. Sure I can try to cut corners and interconnect two distant parts of the circuit together in weird ways ("tight coupling" in software), but the options I will reach for are limited, and "nature" forces me to "decouple" them. With software I can just set a distant variable...
I have a Building Engineer on my team, who also moved to Software Engineering. I can ask for examples in his field too.
90% of programming is enterprise CRUD, and the bar is low. Likewise, 90% of electrical work is basic circuitry with off the shelf parts: does it work and not catch fire. There are electrical engineers doing Real :TM: Engineering, but 90% or more of the work is electrician work.
Sorry, what? This is an extraordinary claim.
If you do not have the experience and skill to express your ideas in text in a clear and concise, you will struggle to write good code (and vice versa tbf).And coders generally are lacking on the more humanities side of their educations.
Case in point - more than one Mars mission has failed due to software errors.
However you could argue that the best way to deal with that complexity is not to have a brilliant mind that can grok more of that complex space, but by simply taking good engineering practices to minimise and manage it - ultimately the complexity is beyond us all if not managed.
Software is ultimately limited to building things in a space that is only countably infinite. There is only so much junk you can hide in a space that is only countably infinite.
All other engineering disciplines by comparison deal in a space that is uncountably infinite and you can hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious. This is exemplified by the unpleasant discovery all of us have had of a supposedly measurable "collection" of intervals having such weird holes all over the real number line and the near impossibility of shifting it up or down that makes sense for it without having to rethink our whole notion of measure and still end up with something like the counting measure that definitely doesn't make sense.
People, including myself, have a seriously bad intuition just how much volume there is in an uncountably infinite space.
I think that you have a basic grasp of the word "dimension" but use the word "euclidean" without understanding what it means just because you heard it in conjunction with "dimension".
If you think that e.g. building a bridge is a three dimensional problem in the sense that you are actually talking about (which has nothing to do with euclidean geometry), you lack the basic understanding of what you are talking about from which you could draw any conclusion like that with any sense of intellectual honesty.
When there's 1000 ways to do a thing, with wildly different pros and cons, and insane amount of unknowns in a field that is evolving so rapidly that it is (near) impossible for someone to keep up, being "competent" is not easy.
The ratio of software engineers working in novel design spaces compared to plumbing style work is best guess ~1:5.
The ratio in more mature fields like civil engineering is closer to ~1:500.
There are lots of similarities between software engineers and the few folk in civil etc doing actual novel design work.
> Nothing that we do is so unique that another competent engineer shouldn't be able to fill in for you when you are having an off day.
In novel design spaces people are not fungible.
Google has something 25,000 developers. You think Google has 5,000 people working on novel design spaces? That number sound way, way too high. By at least an order of magnitude.
And Google at least has customer facing technology compared to the thousands of companies whose developers only work is, say, integrating HR systems or deploying SAP or maintaining some legacy billing system.
Yes.
Maintaining a bridge is in general not novel. There are clearly established best practices that have stood the test of time.
Maintaining a ridiculous tangle of millions of lines of code is novel. There are no best practices on par with other engineering fields. We are at the stage of rough heuristics in most parts of software dev.
One day there will be broad and consistent over time agreement on how to handle large software projects. But we aren't there yet.
A software engineer having no idea how to build something doesn’t make it novel, it just indicates inexperience or ignorance in all but a vanishingly small number of cases.
In practical systems, you won’t find much novelty outside the rare frontiers of performance optimization, systems software architecture, the occasional bit of weird silicon with unusual computational properties, and some narrow algorithm domains that have never been adequately developed e.g. compression and AI. Almost no software development can justify even thinking about these types of things and they virtually never do.
Conventional engineering is worse because the laws of physics constrain almost everything to boring well-explored solutions. In some cases, we’ve pretty much done exhaustive exploration of what is possible.
how much does the strength/weight ratio of building materials improve every year? how much does the price/quality ratio of building materials fall every year?
software engineering is working with technology where compute capacity was doubling and price/performance was halving every two years for decades. this rate of change has slowed, but in a world where the price of everything else inflates, software is a rare field that works with a continually deflating capital base.
the uniqueness of software development is real and based on underlying physical/economic factors that exist in very few industries.
software developers are not unique. they are still human. but the profession is unique and the financial incentives are unique.
consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time wins on average, but because the incentives are large, many people will take the risk to get exceptional rewards.
i approach software development like a professional athlete. i work on optimizing every aspect of my performance (physical, mental, social, technical) to be the very best i can be. anyone who applies this level of dedication in any field will be highly successful, but it requires dedication, sacrifice, and risk, which many people are not willing to accept.
the world is full of exceptional software and algorithms designed by unique individuals who developed things nobody else could or would. there is a reason why mathematical discoveries are named after the people who discovered them.
building software for large corporations necessarily revolves around median-level teams, because mean-reversion always happens at scale, but that is also why a great deal of technical innovation takes place outside of large corporations.
My university has an alternative entrepreneurial focused “senior design” course open to engineers and cs students. Because of scale the CS students are now separated in a different section. All I can say is the level of toxicity that I’ve witnessed from cs students to engineering students has made this a much nicer course to work with teams.
Engineering students can be ego driven now it alls sure, but the level of toxicity behavior and assumptions of superiority I’ve seen from CS students makes me glad I don’t have to deal with them anymore.
The primary fault I see, and it’s buried in the abstractions comments from others is the assumption that their knowledge is all encompassing because it is so abstracted. The inability to attach it to contextual realities is taken as virtue rather than a risk factor.
I always go back to the fast company article on the coding team behind the space shuttle and their culture. The difference is telling in terms of qyality and risk tradeoff. Realistically the number of engineers who will design something that could kill someone and software developers who will exist at opposite ends of the percentage scale. That reality manifests in professional culture. We’ve seen it in so many places.
This threat is insightful but not in the way commenters likely think.
> well known toxic field, finance
I know whenever someone says anything negative like this people come out of the woodwork to say the opposite, and that's fine, but I can't name a single competent programmer who doesn't say things like this in private, and I know a lot of them.
Test it for yourself. The next time you need one of the mediocre people on your team to do something pay attention to how they do it. I will bet you it's something like this: Get the ticket. Spend a day or two trying anything they can think of, googling, pasting stuff into chatgpt, etc. Then they start messaging people. They tend to try to not always ask the same helper because it would get too annoying, so they rotate around the team asking for help. The helper starts by offering suggestions, but the mediocre dev can't get those suggestions working or apply them correctly. Pretty soon the helper just types a bunch of code into the chat window so they can go back to what they are trying to do. The m dev takes this code, and pastes it into their branch. It's not quite right though, it needs a little tweaking to work but they can't figure out what to do, so they message the next helper. (And sometimes it's hilarious what it is, a lot of times it's a typo and when you run the code it says exactly what line it's on, but they don't know how to run code besides pressing the button in their editor that someone else set up for them) To helper 2 it seems like they are making good progress, they are just stuck on some small thing. Happens to everyone. They tell them exactly what's wrong. And voila, this is how about 30% of the people you work with write code. People don't catch on because when you are helper #2 you assume they wrote that perfectly competent code.
The processes surrounding development often strike me as haphazard, cargo-cult like behavior, and entirely subjective.
Regarding people not remembering stuff--yeah that's probably true, but there's a lot a typical developer has to jump between--do people really get to "specialize" in JUST like writing Java CRUD or something anymore?
Feel like there's always also troubleshooting some Docker thing, some cloud provider, some build system, some pipeline etc etc.
When there's no stability and moving targets, maybe you're not incentivized to be a "specialist" on a language or whatever (this might also be painting oneself into a corner for their career) given how easy information retrieval is today?
RE: the scenario
Is this real?
I've never been employed at any sort of fancy role but I've never encountered this kind of thing (publicly) involving me, and I generally get on well with others, so I assume I'd have seen it by now
I'm sure plenty of programmers pasta from LLMs constantly now, but I've never had bizarre low-hanging "what do" inquiries.
Most people have some discipline and structure when asking questions:
- I'm attempting to integrate library x into the project - I've done the following and the build fails in CI with $ERROR - I've checked x, y, z - Have you encountered something similar?
This indicates some level of actual understanding of how things work, or prerequisite research prior to asking.
Also, where can I get a job where they hire people this minimally competent? I'm seriously burnt out and this seems like a nice change of pace.
I'm totally serious with that question.
The weird thing is, at a high performing organization it's relatively straight forward to get a job: be very good at what you do and practice for their hiring process.
At a dysfunctional organization there's not really a way to get hired (apart from an internal recommendation). This is almost by definition, as their hiring process doesn't measure anything reliably. Being physically attractive or charismatic helps a lot.
Actually this gives me an interesting idea, can you measure the quality of an engineering team purely by how ugly they are? My hypothesis is that a dysfunctional team has a low ability to measure aptitude, and so things like physical attractiveness will have a higher impact on hiring decisions.
I don't blame you for wanting a nice stint in one of these dysfunctional companies, I think I could have worked an hour a week and been praised as a top performer at the ones I unfortunately spent time at. I think if you do go this direction you should get 2 or 3 such jobs. It's only a tiny bit more work, and these companies tend to just stop existing some random Tuesday.
I too have been nothing short of perpetually shocked at how dysfunctional a large part of the software industry is. This is why I'm never able to take the "engineering" moniker seriously when people talk about programming.
The hiring process is so maddening and I'm glad you said that.
I get that resume scanning and what not is fully automated and makes no allusion to being a useful nor functioning process, but I'm perpetually amazed as I submit resumes (where I meet or exceed every "requirement") to companies I know are not well-functioning organizations only to be rewarded with an automated rejection email minutes later.
How many years of experience do you have? and how many languages have you written code in? Include all languages where you tweaked or wrote even a single line of code.
>The effect of consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time trumps any number of crunch weeks and burnout episodes, to an almost absurd degree.
If you have an actual life, you know, with unexpected stuff coming up from time to time, this is just not possible. Then the only way to get stuff done is go 10x during the time you have whenever you have it.
I believe PP is correct: the cost of "going 10x" is greater than its benefit in the long run, and often in the short run.
Henry Ford lowered the Ford company work week from 48 hours to 40 hours to improve cars manufactured per labor-hour, and to give employees leisure time to drive places (increasing demand for cars). Wages were raised to compensate, further increasing loyalty to the company while enabling employees to buy more cars.
For software, a 40-hour week may not be optimal, I tend to think that it may be too high rather than too low.
Complex multiyear things are so unique that there is next to 0 chance to find another competent engineer as replacement. Some companies do that, and the only result is the extreme lack of quality and consequently reputation degradation. I witnessed this myself many, many times - great products turning into non-efficient and hard to use BS.
Complex things posses such a big number of moving components that simply iterating over them placing them into context is impossible for anyone except the one that was deep into it for years. Its not possible to "fill in" such person, particularly if that person was lacking in some domains like proper documentation (typical case).
As an example, I am leading a project that creates a government bank from 0. Just in last 2 years I wrote 1000+ pages of compressed documentation on it besides programming and management. Please replace me. My company and I are trying to do that for last 5 years.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Finance people regularly talk about risk adjusted returns, not raw returns.
There is a big difference between filling in someone on an off day, and actually taking over their job. It's only felt over weeks and months.
"Consistent, careful, workmanlike": this does not describe the kind of software built by most teams, but it does describe the work of good individuals.
And not even anything to do with AI.
But i take the title to indicate a bias against neurodivergence — “One of us,” repeated in a robotic monotone over and over. Hahaha ;)
Perhaps i should read the article!
The board decided to promote these people who negotiated a 4-days week; after all the team had never missed a deadline, and gradually I was given more and more tacit responsibilities without explicit status recognition. This creates a double-bind situation for both sides. While I could never be satisfied because of this lack of trust, you have to understand why they approached me with suspicion while being dependent on me.
A 10x engineer (or any Nx engineer with N > 1) has to interface with the rest of the team and this necessarily implies more work. In my case, resentment grew because of the increased workload this led to for them, and my colleagues felt more impacted by this than by deadlines being not met. As for management, since deadlines were already met, they felt more compelled to listen to the negative feedback they gathered about me and develop suspicion. And yet, they had to rely on me for any impromptu problem they had.
What's this article is discussing is not engineers with bouts of outstanding performance but engineers with that symbolical status. It's attacking the myth, and the attribution of that label, not a reality with measurable outcomes. The article doubts that such a measure exists, however the departure of an employee can have destabilizing effects on an organization. The delta won't exactly measure this employee's worth, but an organization can put itself in such a configuration that it will unknowingly rely on a few key individuals for its financial strategy and use the added value these people bring against its competitors, to win investors attracted by this differential in efficiency or proceed to acqui-hires. This leads the company to bind itself to commitments which pushes it near to a dangerous threshold.
Once crossed, when one of the cheap keystone employees leaves, this excess of work can cascade to other keystone employees, and cause more resignations, and the company won't be able to make up for it because its finances are already engaged elsewhere.
The thing about being intelligent is that you have the capacity to find wisdom faster. I’ve worked with too many intelligent fools, and nearly all of them quit rather than face the consequences of their own actions.
I tend to stay too long, either cleaning up after my own messes or someone else’s. Maybe I watched too many westerns as a child. Who knows.
But I’d rather work with someone wise who can’t reinvent bloom filters from first principles than someone who could, and thinks doing so is a good idea.
There’s an ethical trap where you think you’re the only one here who can make something work, because now you’re on the hook to support it and if you have a negative opinion of your peers, how is that going to work out, do you think? Did you think? Or were you too busy wondering if you could do it to think about whether you should?
I think the advice, “never be the smartest person in a room” is just about the biggest bullshit in tech. Intelligent people cannot teach you to be like them. They can’t change your brain much more than you already have, just surviving school and university. But a wise person can teach you three new things before lunch, sometimes without even trying.
Don’t be the wisest person in a room, and if you must be, don’t denigrate the wisdom of beginners. Good teachers learn from their pupils.
This is worth remembering for basically anyone who works on anything, or manages any kind of project.
Get rid of team members that make your life harder. Keep the ones that make it easier.
> Individuals ship software not teams
I can’t see how this is remotely true outside of contorting some definitions of “ship”.
I think it says more about the size of the project and the complexity of the task that you've worked on, rather than "10x engineer vs normal engineer". Not even at a 10 person startup have I seen "one" person done everything. Unless you're talking about someone just forking OSS and gluing it together, to make a carbon-copy application of something that already exist(for free) then sure.
Edit: >key person took charge and made it happen
person - singular.
made it happen - it's hard to call an engine a car. to make something happen, you need all the component (contributions).
I didn’t say that. Read it again.
It’s not even the same person every time, people trade off being that key person.
> I think it says more about the size of the project and the complexity of the task
You have no idea. Please address the ideas rather than making personal assumptions.
> It’s not even the same person every time, people trade off being that key person.
So it's the role that delivers software? I think I agree with that. Even so, that role cannot function without its support system (the team).
For a lot of stuff, one guy who knows what he is doing is worth infinitely more than any number of engineers, because this job is mostly about knowledge, not labor hours.
Even in a regular enterprise web application, one guy whose just more skilled in architecting solutions is insanely valuable. You dont need a bunch of engineers writing a bunch of inconsistent/unthought out apis and architecture, you need one guy to lead it
Unless your project's scale is reasonably small and focused -- representing the equivalent of a true solo or duo sport like tennis -- you need committed, professional "normal" team members to flesh out the team or you'll just never have enough resources to get done everything that needs to get done.
What a great environment to train juniors. Does not sound toxic at all.
Junior does not mean incompetent, it means unexperienced.
People who describe themselves as "great" feel such work is beneath one and know there's only so many hours on earth. Easier to pay a grunt to do that instead. And hence power dynamics are established.
That ego alone is why a team of only "great" engineers is bound to fail. You have a bunch of strong but negative polarity magnets trying to stick together. It simply won't be allowed.
The guy who can roll his own probably also has a better idea than most what easy off the shelf solutions are out there.
It's a shame some can't apply such metaphors tk humans and think "no, sure, there are single processors thst outperform entire distributed networks" we're different".
Which is why I have learned to stay away from people who use that metric.
In 3-4 years when you need to make a drastic change, that’s when the actual business impact comes into play, but this is never measured.
In my experience with some groups, waiting another 2-3 months to do things correctly would have saved years in future work.
strange example, considering that the super-smart owner is purely a delegator at this point, and there are thousands of contributors.
There's only so much code they write per unit time, only so many designs they can consider, only so many meetings they can attend, only so many demonstrations they can perform, only so many regressions they can debug, and really, only so many domains they can master.
Solo projects written by excellent engineers can be stunning works of craft. Many of us prefer to work that way, and accept the compromises of scale or time that are associated with it.
But most projects that you're familiar with need a team to produce them in a way that meets their real-world time and resource requirements. That's where the sports analogy comes in.
(And the same is true for the blacksmith and tailor. One master blacksmith or tailor might do stunning work, but they can't outfit and army or dress a court ball on their own. They need support, and that support often needs to be of a different level of mastery than themselves, if for no reason but to facilitate needed coordination and deference.)
For a long time, OpenSSL, the standard encryption library used in everything from global banking systems to embedded devices, was built and maintained by two full-time engineers. It took the Heartbleed episode in 2014 to publicly acknowledge that potentially millions of technical projects stood (at least in part) on the backs of two nameless individuals along with the contributions of a small number of itinerant volunteers. While teamwork can be an important if fickle instrument, it tends to be a lightning rod for inviting too many cooks into the kitchen. What is often downplayed or goes unsaid in these commendations of teamwork is the place of an individual mind as the wellspring, the sine qua non, of great ideas and projects, including software. As is often the case, one person can solve an issue that has stumped thousands of others. Such individuals tend to work at a faster pace alone than the de facto committees that teams often become as they lose their agility, foresight, and focus. Unlike a football team, coding doesn't require a minimum number of people to achieve greatness. On the contrary, the opposite appears to be true - that there's a Dunbar's number for doing good work.
OpenSSL was made by a team, just read the history.
> For the first 15 years, OpenSSL membership was mostly a small collection of individuals working on a part time basis and the membership fluctuated and changed through those years.
I never claimed OpenSSL was the product of a lone wolf or that teams have no place in coding. The essence of my point is that the invocation of "teamwork", often as a concept and practice distinct from the sum of its parts, obscures the significance of individual contributors who making great software. After all, code is a mirror of the mind. That one can distinguish between great and not-so-great code implies that one can distinguish between a great and not-so-great coder.
E.g. https://bellard.org/
To add to the insult, I'd challenge you to think of how many "great teams" of "normal" engineers, whatever any of these terms means, could pull off most of these projects in any amount of time.
Great professionals exist. They produce great work that is tough to reproduce. Your "helping" them does not mean they couldn't have done it without you.
I have contributed to one of the projects he originally authored, and my mundane contributions along with other volunteers not as brilliant as him have ensured the continued success of the project. I'm with gp: teams ship software, not individuals. Individuals may ship bug-fixes or largish features, but for software in the large, that is the realm of teams.
I've been there & done that: I've been the person that crunches and turns around impossible situations, and I have also spent months cleaning up after a 10x engineer who shipped a feature in "record time" that made the company lots of money but caused countless support calls and bugfixes for months on end until it stabilized. Many so-called 10x aren't, and rely a lot on a supporting cast of regulars to enable their "outstanding" work
There is also a time dimension to software. I have been on some occasions the only developer of pieces software that were tackling hairy problems that teams of "normal" developers would avoid. I always wanted to solve those problems in a way that would make everyone's life easier. To do that I had to spend a ton of deep focus time on modeling the problems effectively, and if I was successful, people who were put off by the problem space would come and contribute, because they found the model amenable. Or they thought it'd benefit them to be a part of a project that's picking up steam. A lot of these people would fix small issues here and there, but some of them actually donated a lot of focus and helped take these projects to new levels. The ones making the deep changes always cared deeply about the problem space, or brought a lot of knowledge from another subset of cs, and I wouldn't call them "normal". I think it is a disservice to the sacrifices they made to do what nobody else felt like doing and throw a blanket statement like "teams of mundane contributors do the really important work".
This is not a dig at "normal" devs - I have been the "normal" dev on many projects, but because of my experiences I try to give credit where credit is due.
I also detest the 10x thing exactly for the reasons you pointed out.
But you still need people to actually care about their work and get it done even when it’s not “hard”. Someone who could be a solid engineer on one team could be a “10xer” on another team just from caring about the project and consistently putting in the hours on it, if their team is mostly coasting by doing the bare minimum or highly underskilled. In fact I think many so-called 10xers may just be solid engineers who found themselves in workplaces with a culture of “not my problem” or “I can probably stretch this ticket out a few weeks”.
Conversely if you take someone who might be a wizard on one team and drop them into some super complex “engineering catnip” project they might just be seen as a solid engineer there. I think cases like that demonstrate the author’s point pretty well: if you design the project’s processes and tooling around the wizard’s wizards who eg dont use debuggers because they have some insane skill with tracing running binaries you are missing out on the productivity you might gain from the less skilled engineers.
Both have their place. On the topic of greatness (your example, Linux, as opposed to say a build script for vending machine firmware) I couldn’t agree more with both you and the people disagreeing with you.
We're currently in deep shit because a long term dev was under the assumption that you can only instantiate objects once. He built an insanely complex system around the belief, which shipped. Our users used that system to write configuration files that now drive a machine that cost about half a billion dollars. So we can barely change anything because the data must be supported for 25 years.
The cost of such fools is orders of magnitude higher than their salary. I'm convinced that the world would be a better place without bad devs. Everything would be faster with less people, too.
In the organization I work in we have an operations team to take care of day to day failure. Write a run book, set up ticketing, hand it off, good to go. I treat this work and hand off as a high priority, as it frees up my time to work on other things. The ones who are chronically busy and appear to be “carrying the water” don’t do it. Their time is dominated my support, they are constantly busy, and it looks like they are doing a lot… but they’re doing work that can and should be handed off.
I’ve been the water carrier as well, but always tried to skill up people any time I had the opportunity. Or I’d build tools to make it easier for people to help, or find a niche where they could be useful doing something that would really improve things that I either didn’t have the time or interest for.
If you measure something meaningful it's teams. If it's LOC or some macho measure of productivity (rewrites in Rust using the hardest frameworks) then yeah it's those "tenexxers".
This is true at time T. But over time (can be as short as a matter of weeks), it is not anymore. Team work, interactions, support, resiliency takes over, in a good way.
And that's a good thing, because that's how you build relevance for your work.
If your take on managing your team is fighting complacency and mediocrity, maybe it's the hiring/training/managing process that ought to be reviewed _first_.
The number of times I've reviewed someone's code that's been "in progress" for 3 weeks, to see it's 200 lines of simple python code... ugh
"oh, but it was really actually complex and you just don't get it" --> Incorrect
I worked once with a young engineer that spent 3 weeks for 2 lines of code. We celebrated him as a fucking superstar, because those 2 lines were in a low-level linux library, and he went so deep to find that bug, it was insane. He earned the reputation as one of the top problem-solvers in a multi-hundred person org.
So that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the developers (so many of them) who spend 2+ weeks in standups saying they're "working on automating the deployment", and when it's done you look at their code, and it's an argparse block followed by 6 lines of calling docker with trivial parameters. You've seriously never seen this? Lucky you, then.
Which is completely wrong.
I understand that complex problems can (should) be solved with simple code. That's not what I'm talking about.
Simple problems should be solved with simple code, and good developers do this quickly. If someone takes 3 days to figure out how to make a one-line REST api to a well-documented service, they are not productive.
Maybe I just unfairly expect developers at top companies to be able to not get stuck at every step and to not get confused by basic programming. I probably just need to recalibrate and understand that what I consider to be slow developers (certainly by comparison to the many excellent people I've worked with), are actually the norm, and I should just be OK with that.
In the grand scheme of things, the 10x-100x engineers work gets attenuated - think of it as some kind of averaging filter.
Do you think some 10x engineer carried the moon landing? or the Large Hadron Collider?
Sure, if you work on some dinky team single-digit number of workers, the contribution from the 10x engineer will be more apparent - but as the number of people involved increases, the more important the average is.
It is about programming languages and tools, about database design/schemas.
Choose the wrong language/tool for the job and the amount of work needed to solve the job easily expands 10x.
Guido van Rossum and James Gosling and Anders Hejlsberg likely have reduced the amount of work by 10x for a lot of projects compared to implementing them in a lower level programming language.
Average, is of course relative to the sample. If some "elite" company only hires 10x engineers, there's likely not going to be any 10x engineers there. The most productive engineer will probably only be slightly more productive than the worst.
If some other company has zero standards for hiring, to a degree where you can basically pick anyone off the streets and put them to code, the best will probably Nx (where N is very large) more productive than the worst.
But even then, there are so many dimensions and aspects to this.
The Roman emperor could make or break entire regions by vaguely wagging a few fingers. If and when he made a good decision - which could often easily be attributed to good luck - he could be, and was, heralded as the best thing since sliced bread because he saved millions. Such power surely must be divine. I don't think so.
Not saying Linus or Guido aren't competent engineers. I'm just saying that I don't think they are the sliced bread many make them out to be. They are good. Lots of people are good, but not many people get to be the first to create Python.
And, to be frank, Python - and its ecosystem - and me are through the honeymoon phase. Let's just say the chemistry has worn off and I'm not quite so sure Guido is the net positive we think he is. Maybe Python replaced some other upcoming far superior language. We can't know. (I suspect it did.)
In general I don't think individual/personality worship is a net positive on any axis.
You can have a single genuinely senior 10x engineer oversee all those efforts, executed by "normal" engineers. But no, not execute them all by the 10x engineer's self.
Understanding this distribution of productivity is a great litmus test for a manager. If they say the distribution of productivity is shaped much differently than this, that is a red flag. They probably can't tell who is contributing, and you can't trust them to do the basic functions of hire, retain, fire.
The article reads like it was written by a manager with tunnel vision. A manager's value-add comes from making a bunch of "normal" people productive, while staying out of the way of the few engineers who will deliver >50% of the value anyways. If you only focus on making the normal people productive, you are only doing the additive part of your job, and neglecting the negative part, which is to recognize and not interfere with the high performers. I would imagine this guy goes around creating lots of least-common-denominator systems/processes, which drive away talent and make the high performers less productive.
> It’s a competitive advantage to build an environment where people can be hired for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses; where the emphasis is on composing teams
There's plenty of otherwise "10x" programmers who go outside of their strengths and suffer for it.
Indeed this is one of the hard problems for a manager.
The "complacency" and "mediocrity" you mention have deep roots in politics and human psychology and I'd wager less than 1% have anything to do with tech. One of the many things you do in a business is wrestling with such monsters as capitalism and its various types of dysfunction and a plethora of other nice human factors such as hunger for prestige, power and social status.
To give a concrete example: at the moment I am quite ineffectual at work and the core reason is that I just don't give a flying F. I wasn't always like this. I distinctly remember not being like this. I was made into this and I'm sick and tired to pretend it's actually my own fault.
It's sad to see us engineering types being herded by power hungry psychopaths into arenas where we fight eachother to the death like roosters to see who is the "10x".
LoL?
By that logic CEOs are super humans too, cuz they own the companies? :D
>A players hire A players, B players hire C players etc
Where did you hear it?
It seemed more interesting a decade ago, but I can't be sure if it's because the quality was higher or if was because I didn't know better…
- There is no "10x race horse", as there's different kinds of horses who win different kinds of races (and those horses don't win consistently). Similarly, "10x engineer" would imply there's only one kind of engineer, one kind of engineering, or only one way they can be productive. You can certainly find a "person who is very productive under certain circumstances". "10x engineer" is an extreme oversimplification of a generic person doing a generic job; but people aren't generic, and this job isn't generic. There just is no "10x engineer". It would be the coder equivalent of the Übermensch.
- It's not a good idea to bet the farm on one lone genius. They could get hit by a bus, be hired away somewhere else, or just not be "inspired" by your company or team and end up not producing. Instead build a team of competent and diverse individuals led by a decent leadership/management team who can create consistent results without having to find a magic wizard coder. (Personally, if I found out someone in my org was risking the business on a single person that was impossible to replace, I would be upset)
- There's just not that many super-talented people out there. The few that are, pick where they want to work; you don't hire them, they hire you, so to speak. And even when you think you've met one, it may actually just be bluster or a false reputation.
Exactly.
I think i'll never click on an IEEE Spectrum article again.
IEEE has jumped the shark.
But for certain kinds of software development, a team of "normal engineers" can't do what a single 10x engineer can do. For example, how many "normal engineers" would you need to replace an Ilya Sutskever? The answer is you can't. Because intelligence is not stackable.
No disagreement there at all. "Normal engineers" are all you need for "normal software" such as CRUD apps.
> We place too much emphasis on individual agency and characteristics, and not enough on the systems that shape us and inform our behaviors.
This is just author trying to impose their personal politics on their org. Popular sentiment among pmc unfortunately especially in the last 10 years of zirp
I wonder what Sutskever would think if you asked him that question. I bet he'd point out several of his contemporaries that are more deserving of praise.
I'd argue there are plenty of Sutskever's out there who are normal engineers.
Most 1x developers just care about getting the job done regardless of care or code quality, which in my experience has led to conflict.
Some engineers have an obsessive, sometimes compulsive, nature which is actually at odds with the business. These types usually spent a large amount of time in institutionalized learning settings and will be far more opinionated about how their labor is allocated.
Most 1x engineers/developers care deeply about users and the end product, and also likes to keep the code well maintained and performant, so they can do their peaceful work and go home, while not making the life of the user any more miserable.
Most 10x engineers are too brilliant and remain busy rocking the boat and doing so many mind blowing things at any given time that the destruction trail is only materialising slowly once their presence has faded for a while and the remnants are being pieced together.
I think, we equate the frenzy with 10x(productivity & excellence) while the less creative and cautious ones tend to be the most valuable over long term with most boring stuff.
Of course to each their own, but the too many destructions of the 10x stars had made me very weary these days.
This myth that more productive developers are somehow worse and will ruin projects is just rationalization without any ground in reality.
This is just rationalization.
But can we stop saying people who are good at there job are actually bad at their job and being mediocre actually means you are great?
Like I know I'm being pedantic but this kind of culture is toxic to everyone.
Edit: sorry for ranting under your comment. I'm sure you are a normal person just trying to get through your day. I just had to scream somewhere
People who claim they are 10x'ers are often not. They are mess makers or wannabes. They appear 10x to those who do not take messes or tech debt into account.
You screaming (to use your lingo) that my buddy above is not a 10x is what the rest of us have been screaming about our co-workers!
I'm not claiming people can't be 10x'ers. Nor am I saying being good is actually bad.
In any creative industry Price's is well known phenomen. 50% of work is done by square root of people. But in reality there large number of problems that cannot be solved by average developer.
That why people that build tooling, compilers, important libraries and frameworks make often 100 times more impact. They increase productivity of everyone
e.g. Linus is a classic 10x or 100x engineer and his code(Linux, Git etc) has been maintained by a completely uncoordinated team for decades.
This kind of reply is just flipping the stereotype and going in another insane extreme without any evidence at all, just conflating productivity with recklessness...
If 1x is the absolute rock-bottom lowest possible productivity, are them really the precious angels who care deeply about the user while making amazing code?
This is even more absurd.
You understand the original meaning of the term. This is not how most people use it nowadays.
The assertion made by GP is absurd regardless of the definition, period.
And the 10x you mentioned are not 10x. They are 1x with frenzy.
If one is not multiplying the team output, they are simply 1x or lower (maybe a few exceptions)
More so if in the light of day their work sucks.
Discussions about 10x engineers are not about “wannabe 10x engineers”.
—
I have yet to come across an intellectual area where there isn’t a long tail of higher talent.
As the “x” goes up they just get more rare in reality, and even rarer to see. Because they are not always being optimally challenged. Most problems are mundane. And optimally challenging workers isn’t really a business plan for anything.
I think there is such thing as a 10x problem, which you have to find before your 10x engineer really shines. Identifying hard but exceptionally valuable problems to solve takes 10x vision. And time and luck.
If a "10x engineer" is not given 10x problems, they will.. create some.
A 10x engineer that pushes a problem to prod is not a 10x. You get to 10x by not making mistakes, any issue you create sets you back ten squares.
Which works for some time, or when extensively coached, but eventually they move since their time is oh so precious and now you have the rest of the team to work with their work. Not that great.
Then people wonder or complain when business doesn't appreciate devs. How would you look at folks who are critical to your success yet often don't have your company's best interest at the center of their efforts.
To use your terms, those 1x devs always end up maintaining and evolving that code of 10x guys. Their velocity with changes is massively lower and error rate is significantly higher compared to code created by 1x devs. This is what business sees and there is not much love for that.
I've seen it first-hand. We ended up building a support team around the 10x:er to keep things working, but it was easily worth it. It worked very well for the life span of the product - about a decade.
Many eventually graduated to pretty fancy places. They learned a lot. This particular 10x:er loved sharing knowledge via pair-programming.
Well, he was always in command of the keyboard (typing insanely fast), but you'd sit next to him and he'd delight in explaining. Eventually you would challenge him on something and then the collaboration/adventure began.
I have had the most intellectually exhilarating times of my life working with this guy.
So yeah, 10x:ers can bring massive value if they are wired to be really nice.
I've met that an instance of that kind of 10x:er (well, 5x:er, in this case). He defaulted to dismissing everyone until they had proven themselves.
I don't think there is much you can do to "improve him".
Does the company have my best interests at the center of their efforts or I can be shown the door at any given moment to please shareholders? No hard feeling pls, it's just business and I have only one life to enjoy.
Anyone wanting to improve their resume or have fun from 9 to 5 is in the right here. Life is short.
However it is my responsibility as a manager to ensure the team is working towards its goals and nobody is making anyone's life difficult.
You don't have a 10x without there being a 0.1x engineer. And we can't all be right.
1x is normal. Some people are less, some people are more. Normal is good and predictable. There's nothing wrong with normal. Normal people that put in a decent effort will produce results. That's a good thing. For a lot of long lived software, normal is what you want. You can't reasonably ask normal people to be more than normal. That would be abnormal. Putting in 120% of your best is not a thing. It doesn't work that way. You are doing pretty OK if you are getting 70-80% of your theoretical best. That's what normal is.
There are of course people who are a bit more capable than their average peers. This is often confused with working long hours. The ability to work longer is mostly something young, relatively healthy people are good at. But there's a difference between working longer and working smarter. You can't work 10x more than a normal person. There's only 24 hours in a day. The only logical way to get 10x more done is to work smarter. There is no other way. And some people really just are that good that they get more work done in the same amount of time. Part of that is experience, brains, and just being really efficient with their time.
An exhausted 10x developer is not a 10x developer. Because they'll be perpetually too tired to work smart. So they might be producing a lot of code but it will be the type of code that will need a lot of maintenance. A true 10x developer consistently writes less code with high impact without wearing themselves out too much. Doing that requires skill and experience. The best code is code you don't have to write. Use the right libraries, avoid reinventing wheels, make your code testable (so you don't get bogged down debugging it), don't repeat yourself, etc. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again, automate it. That's your job. Don't keep on doing the same thing. That would be stupid and somebody else will do something smarter eventually.
> 1x is normal.
IIRC the post that came up with the 10x and 1x terminology used 1x as the worst performer. Normal/average was somewhere in between 10x and 1x.
The change to 1x being average in the common understanding seems to have happened because even the people criticizing it have an intuitive understanding that it's correct, they just want the boundaries somewhere else.
The key to a great team is great leadership.
Most people are terrible leaders, and they think that what they are worth is what makes them leadership material, even though they didn’t earn that worth themselves and didn’t put in a hard graft.
The key to a great team is a fucking team. Only then can there be a leader.
Let’s talk about ‘normal’ CEOs, 10x CEOs, and for that matter, ‘retarded’ CEOs, considering a particular one of them favours that insult. That’s the implication of ‘normal’ in scare quotes no?
Having said that, there is also something to be said about engineers who consistently cave into management pressure not because of brute force management tactics, but because the engineers themselves haven't spent the effort to build confidence into good engineering practices that will allow them to both fend off pressure and deliver better work. I see people complaining: "oh the company we work for does this, that, the other, irrational things". Yes this is true, but what are you doing about it.
Do you expect higher ups, detached from reality and practice, to drive your working processes in a rational manner? This can only be the exception and we all know it. There are exceptions that proove the rule
It doesn't happen very often, but when it does...
It's never an execution problem, it's a management.
Coding and productivity are one thing, but engineering in the end is a lot about having a certain awareness of the impact your technological choices have on a project both in the short and long term. I'd rather take someone who has this awareness, than someone who hasn't, even if the person in the latter category would be slightly better at coding.
I met great engineers or developers who won't even care to answer a fizzbuzz-type question.
I met terrible ones who had top technical and math capabilities but little agency at pointing what is relevant or not in their work.
Even considering it's pyramid-shaped is excluding all the externalities that make one person thrive in some contexts, and just flat or negative in others.
Take a top performer, if he's not in the right position at the right time, nothing will happen. Conversely, someone not so good, but being in the right place at the right moment may nudge things in the right direction.
That's exactly around what I understand the OP develops in her article: engineering, building is a work of teams, not individuals. In a team, people come and go, roles are different, shift with time and progress. "Terrible" people become "excellent" and the other way around, that's life.
Perfect performance all the time isn't even what we require of machines, because then they (or systems they relate to) break faster. Why would one have the same expectations with people?
I run a technical recruiting company, and we ask candidates a question like [2] on our interview (EDIT: we ask other stuff too, this is only part of it). It's not exactly fizzbuzz, but it's really not far beyond it. A candidate we interviewed just a couple days ago took that problem and couldn't even complete the first step. This is the equivalent of asking someone applying for a job as a statistician what the distribution of the sum of two normals is, or asking someone applying for a job as a con-law lawyer what the fifth amendment is, and having them go totally blank.
Is it conceivable that they were just having a rough day and their brain hiccuped really badly? Sure, I suppose. If we did ten thousand interviews, we'd probably have at least one person who is objectively great perform that way.
But would you bet on that? Bet your team, your product, your company, your mission, whatever is important to you, on their ability to get things done? I don't think you would. And hiring (and everything else in business) is about making good bets, not about batting 1.000.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43006330 [2] https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/practice-coding-problem
Maybe I never encountered your perspective; in 20 years in the industry, in about 10 significant software prod/consulting companies, we never outsourced hiring or pre-hiring. From my experience and perception, minor coding tests are a hiring filter than does not gives good results, for both sides of the interview.
You want to hire junior candidates? that test is fun and maybe ok an indicator. Having them live comment/describe/solve existing pieces of code is much more effective and fast. They will still demonstrate ability once on the job, that's what juniors are for.
You want to hire experienced (or even senior) candidates and filter for domain knowledge? 1. Filter on experience & referrals. 2. Conversations: same approach as with the juniors, but much deeper and wider, relevant to your domain. 3. Call at least one reference to counter-check.
A generic fizzbuzz/minesweeper (remember also "code a functional basic blog engine with comments in 30min" back in 2006) coding test demonstrates (in my very subjective and limited opinion) laziness and kind of a lack of interest in the candidate from the hiring person/company.
I understand that when you screen 1000s of people, it gets massive and more basic filters may apply, at least at first contact, though.
> But would you bet on that? Bet your team, your product, your company, your mission, whatever is important to you, on their ability to get things done? I don't think you would. And hiring (and everything else in business) is about making good bets, not about batting 1.000.
I've seen more rejected candidates because of "soft skills" failures than because of technical skills. And much more fired for behaviour than for technical/performance issues. Domain knowledge can be trained, fixed and integrated within the company. Behaviour cannot.
The reason I don't believe in (1) is that the candidate I described in my previous post claims nearly fifteen years of experience, some of it as a lead, and completely bombed our entire interview. Referrals are another matter (and they are indeed an excellent channel when you can get them), but they tend to be pretty low-volume - if you're hiring from the general public at all, presumably referrals didn't get you what you wanted.
By the same token, the majority of people we've placed so far were people whose resumes didn't particularly shine - but who turned out to be very good engineers when given an opportunity to actually work on a problem. (That isn't just my opinion, it's the opinions of the companies that hired them.)
For (2), I agree. We do do that as well (coding's one of three parts of our interview, not the whole thing).
For (3), have you ever had a reference give a negative review? A lot of companies make it outright policy to do so, and iirc there are legal restrictions on employers doing so in a lot of places. I wouldn't trust that with any reliability (although it's still good practice 'cause it's cheap).
> I've seen more rejected candidates because of "soft skills" failures than because of technical skills. And much more fired for behaviour than for technical/performance issues. Domain knowledge can be trained, fixed and integrated within the company. Behaviour cannot.
Of course soft-skills matter! I never meant to imply otherwise. But soft skills will only get you so far if you don't know how to do the fundamental responsibilities of your job.
As for (3), I never got _negative_ reviews, rather confirmations or hints that confirmed what emerged through the interviews and either lead us to stop the process (rare, but happened) or helped adjusting the position and onboarding to better fit the hire.
I also don't buy into the 10x pushback, there's not only 10x engineers, there's 100x engs. Easy to prove, can you think of an engineer that adds negative value? That deletes tests, or breaks stuff? That adds left-pad to package.json? Or log4j? The bigger the org the bigger the damage. Boom, you have a -1x engineer, and conversely a +1x engineer. If they do a lot of damage that's a -10x engineer. If they do some damage and contribute a little bit maybe they can get into positive numbers, and you have a 0.1x engineer, therefore there exist 10x engineers (and 100x and 1000x and inf and -10x engineers.)
I do agree that performance is not quantifiable (or very hard to quantify) and that it is not a property of an engineer ( although the article suggests performance is a variable of teams or the org, but I would say it's a property of the engineer-product pair)
Here's my pointless randomly made up on the spot anecdote - you're more likely to write a vulnerability in your own logging system than being impactedby using a widely adopted opensource one.
No. Have you really worked with someone that did this and they weren't fired?
Have you ever seen a product that got worse over time instead of better?
I find that it's the majority. Even if they get sales and more users. I'll list the exceptions: whatsapp, and even they succumb to bloat features like ai slop or stories or "communities".
If you take a wider period, all software gets worse with time(they die, nothing is forever).
If a bridge falls, will the engineer wash his hands?
Likewise, product managers and designers who are talking to customers and conducting user experience research have the context to make decisions that engineers can't reasonably second guess.
If an engineer doesn't have control or follows the designs of an architect, they are merely in an executor role, and their engineering skill is put to use not in inventing or solving a problem but merely executing.
There's a time and place for that, but it's definitely not the dream when I think of the engineer I would want to be.
In this dream, what is the role of UX researcher? Of product manager? How many such "elite" engineers are working on the product at one time? What's her relationship with the customer or end user? Are all the engineers on her team "elite", or is there only one? How does she interface with stakeholders? At what stage of her design process does she submit wireframes, prototypes, or plans for review? How much of her time is spent accessibility testing? How does she receive feedback about the product?
Like you, I've been happiest in my role when invited to share in the full discovery, design, and implementation processes from end to end; as a software engineer, I always look forward to engaging with customers/users and participating in--even leading!--research and design activities. But I also recognize that should our team be so lucky as to acquire a person more expert in those methods than I, the artifacts of their intelligence are only more grist for the mill.
> their engineering skill is put to use not in inventing or solving a problem
As Feynman put it, "there is plenty of room at the bottom," and as Cook said, "all ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system," but if the first seven layers bore you, by all means, hack the eighth!
Yes, i have many examples. Two of them I personally fired. One of them, I should have fired much early. I let this engineer basically add negative value by trying to make his peers (other engineers) finish the work it was delegated to him, thus creating negative value by preventing the other, highly productive engineers, to do their tasks.
I warned him not to do this, but he didn't heed. Sadly due to Human Resources the firing process took way too long. I should've acted earlier.
The thing I don't understand personally with these people is why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate to doing so much extra work.
I get it if you're a founder of a startup but not if you're at a big company
Yet every big company I've worked at there are always 1-2 people on the team who seem completely obsessed with the project, like its their main hobby/purpose
It makes me wonder, if someone is so smart that they can do "10x" the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don't get 10x the rewards?
I think you figured it out.
I've been in the industry long enough now to see those 10x engineers having pride in their work get their mindset shattered because John from financials thinks they can juice the next quarter by laying them off.
If you want to have pride in your work as a supposed 10x engineer, work at 2x or 3x and save the remaining for yourself.
I mean more that the optimal amount of work to put in is still above average but way below 10x
One (engineer-turned) manager I have in mind: show up at 10am, leave at 4pm, solve a zillion hard problems in the mean time. Are they 10x? If they save me 2 weeks of work with their insight then I guess I have to admit yes.
Lots of people are happy to just do whatever, go home and not work on personal projects. Plenty of people here defend it.
Why should productive engineers change their habits just not to be called a sucker?
This is about how capitalism is structured it's not at all a matter of personal choice.
What about truly enjoying your job and getting paid handsomely for it (compared to almost all other jobs) being sufficient to one's happiness?
Also, if you don't realise that being the one running the show is orders of magnitude harder than following the lead and doing your stuff then you never really done it before. Having ALL the control has advantages and many less obvious disadvantages.
sometimes, you just find fun in things and it's cool. other times, it's like what other other thing you gonna do? fish or hang with people or do drugs or dance? software's a hobby really. sometimes its more fun.
but really it's all preference.
The reward is there allright, it just isn't monetary.
Pareto principle.
> why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate
Some people are just work horses by nature. They're too busy fulfilling their idea of a "job well done" to worry about the relative fairness of their employment.
Not to mention being a 10x coder doesn't mean you can simply parlay your skills into the greatest possible rewards. There's a lot of important context that makes a 10x possible in the first place.
And that efficiency can translate in 10x output, but it's not guaranteed.
My opinion on the 10x engineer principle, always was that these people have their best development/debug environment setup. And they can traverse, run, and explore code faster than most. Like world record pizza makers in under a minute.
Through my career I've seen some engineers that were stumbling their way around their tooling after years of use, and some that weren't even touch typing. Factor that in.
> It makes me wonder, if someone is so smart that they can do "10x" the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don't get 10x the rewards?
> Maybe because they enjoy the work they do
I think this is kind of a nasty attitude. I absolutely cannot stand working with people like this. Why would you insinuate that someone is stupid because they get more done? To me it sounds like you are just insecure about others’ output, so you have to tell yourself that it’s stupid and pathetic to be fully engaged at work.
Depending on the company and person they often are compensated much more down the line when they get fancy titles or apply what they spent more time learning/practicing.
That’s my experience, at least. Cleaner code, separation of responsibilities, and good documentation seem to help though. But I do think a lot of the time people are mistaking “more productive developers” with “devs who got stuck with knowing all the random shit that our horrible codebase relies on” lol
Most of the >1x engineers I met can’t help themselves and be their best version.
Then other days I solve 3 problems for other people which are easy for me because I have bashed my head against those particular kinds of walls before. I suddenly feel worthy again.
I'm productive when I know exactly what I'm going to do but getting to that point is hard and looks like I'm doing nothing. I find that people who are more productive than me often just don't hesitate and take all the easy exits that I waste time worrying about. I can't give up on my style because I always feel happier with the result.
Sometimes they're just faster because they're repeating a successful pattern they've used before.
I have often had to fix code written by "reputedly" very productive people and it's not a rule but more than a few times it has been very brittle and unmaintainable.
What I'm saying is that speed is usually NOT magic. It's achieved in a particular way and that is sometimes not good....but you tend to find out later.
Who benefits from rhetoric about xN programmers? It's about extracting the most value out of you in an unsustainable way. It's shortsighted. If you're going to be productive while maintaining your sanity, it is an uphill battle. This is especially true for people who are especially sensitive to this kind of pressure, and can drive themselves into a wall if they aren't careful.
How can you meaningfully separate these?
I don't think decent skills and ordinary expertise gets you that, especially "move fast" on top of the other things. But the convenient thing about "normal" is I can move the goal posts wherever and it sounds valid.
The article also did not say how often the normal engineers produce bugs of varying severity, so I guess it's possible to move fast and create a manageable amount of bugs?
Their two big arguments are that 1) people aren't 10X at everything, they are at most 10X at specific things and 2) what good is a 10X engineer if they are on a team that can't perform at that level?
There isn't something magical about 10X engineers, but the fact is there are engineers who have developed the skills to greatly exceed their peers and work in those sub disciplines at which they have this skill. Who cares if your 10X mobile app engineer would be no better than anyone else at microprocessors, they aren't working on microprocessors. Likely anyone could become a 10X engineer, but most don't. It's like great athletes or great musicians - whom no one would question are 10X better than average even if quantifying skill in those domains is hard - maybe there is some level of god given talent but for the most part it's years of effort that other people just don't put in.
Then yes, engineering is often a group effort and a bad team can certainly hold someone back, but just as in sports a strong player can certainly elevate an otherwise mediocre team particularly if well utilized, a 10X engineer can massively improve the output of those around them. No one on earth would say it doesn't matter if our band had a great cellist because the rest of the orchestra probably isn't exceptional. If a team holds its high performers back, that's a problem with the team, not a limitation of high performance.
I also have had the experience that some colleagues had worked on optimizing an algorithm for months and months. I too had looked at the algorithm and one day, almost out of the blue, I came up with a short cut that totally avoided said algorithm and implemented the required functionality with some calls to a function in standard library we were already using. Again, I was met with disbelieve when I presented the solution.
I feel that I am the guy who about once per year comes up with an idea that no one else had thought about and that most of the time I am just not very productive and often find myself daydreaming and not being very productive.
I also feel that often I am far ahead of other with respect to ideas and that I fail to convince others about a my '(too) advanced' approach. I several times have been in the situation that I proposed a solution to a problem and that some kind of manager decided to go for a simpler solution and that after months of develop time, it came to be that certain functionality did not work and that it was simply decided that that functionality was not going to be supported anymore.
Due to changes in the input data, a simulator was crashing completely and very early in the simulation, making it unusable. We had to solve this quickly. The underlying module that was crashing had been written by a non-software engineer, and it showed. The project manager was trying to understand it and do the most minimal fix to it as possible. My solution was to rewrite the module from the ground up; this solved the bug, the whole thing is going 2x faster than the previous version and is much simpler. This day I should have been working on a bullshit, internal politics-driven license module, and thus I disobeyed the manager. I couldn't think of anything else anyway, the code has to "get out".
A few days after, I showed my thing and the client royally ignored it, preferring to continue with fixing the older, shittier solution. After 10 or 20 minutes they finally caved and accepted to merge my thing. I don't understand the initial reaction at all.
I once took up a lot of space to be a super productive engineer and only ended up being isolated. The business saw that some engineers were saying things worked great and were easy, so more responsibility was thrown on me and the other engineers moved to another project that needed headcount. Me and another guy ended up building on and maintaining what used be a reasonably sized team. It got on me because I made sure to know everything so I could make it as great as I could. This sounds good, but this particular business didn't care about me at all, I was just another gear.
I've met "productive" engineers that got things done really quickly from the business perspective, then moved on to being awesome somewhere else. But, they also took shortcuts, didn't write documentation, and made things unmaintainable. When I joined the team after they were being awesome somewhere else, I had to do things like guess hostnames and find out how and where things were running..
The people I've liked working with the most have been parents. The boundaries are more clear, they value stability, and aren't heros.
This isn't the worst thing in the world. I'd rather inherit something with little/no documentation that followed the standard business practices (e.g naming conventions, nothing crazy bespoke) and have to do an afternoon of investigation than have to read documentation that's inaccurate. Of course the best option is full documenation but due to the nature of business that isn't always possible.
And the key to great teams and organization is the "process", and not the presence of specific, 10x people.
But that means in such an org, you are just a replaceable cog. So from the point of a 10x engineer, you absolutely want your org to be dependent on you.
[0]: “The Myth of the Hero Programmer” https://matthewsinclair.medium.com/0061-the-myth-of-the-hero...
Once you define it as an engineer who ships 10x as much business impact (ships fewer bugs, builds the right features, etc), it’s less contested but also less glamorous and harder to measure. In fact you start to develop an inkling that such people may not even be the same coders you once idolized.
There are good answers, like John is an expert in the specific technology you're using and he was hired through a meet-up you sponsor; there are bad answers, like John has found a way to game the ticket system; and there are debatable answers, like John's team has a high support burden which he never helps with. If you insist on seeing him as a 10x developer through innate skill or divine fiat, then you're not going to look for the root cause of why he's doing more work than everyone else.
When we talk about 10X, it should be about comparing it to the least productive team member - the 1X. There is always going to be a 1X person on the team. That's not bad if the team average is 1.5-2X, but if the average and discrepancy gets large enough, you're going to have the 10-100X team member who gets a lot done.
Also, not all work is equal. The 10X engineer who is only 10X in programming may be a 1X in collaboration or documentation. That's not a good dynamic, either. Again, appreciate the point of the article, "build great teams", but we need the 10X person in each task to do that. If the build pipeline is slow and costing us money, I need the best people on the team to go figure that out. And, I need our worst engineer who is still learning to be involved so that they can grow their skills. Become a 1.1x, 1.2x, etc.
Hat tip to these articles on 10x engineer studies: https://jasoncrawford.org/10x-engineers https://www.construx.com/blog/productivity-variations-among-...
If you want to move the discussion of 10X devs away from the 10X dev then stop using the term "10X dev".
In any event, it doesn't really matter because engineering managers should just hire the best fit for their team. The unicorns are rare and expensive and may not be the best fit compared to just a stallion who likes to run.
Wise words for hiring managers.
This is often the opposite of the truth. That is, teams are much more often formally-owning software, but "owning" in the sense of actually being responsible and feeling responsible for its functioning, well-being, and strive towards polish and realization of potential - more often than not, it's one or a few individuals. If it's a large software system, a lot of people have to put in their work as well, but still.
I am occasionally in a situation where I feel more "ownership" towards a software project I have no formal responsibility for than I believe the formal owners do, and find the, to be poor stewards of that software. Not that I have the time to take over for them, but I have the motivation, and it pains me to see them mistreat it and mar it with unworthy merges.
PS - I am not speaking as a supposed "10x engineer".
This is a healthy perspective that hopefully avoids some of the controversy around the 10x label. Any improvement you make to how the team works together, be it CI process, sharing/evaluating ideas, code reviews, design, anything, is multiplied by the team size/responsibilities. Maybe high-functioning teams are part of what enable the 10x outputs that perpetuates the meme.
From what I remember in mythical man month it's sort of addressed there (different roles/support roles being just as critical as others) and recently reading "soul of a new machine" it was clear how dependent even the most skilled roles were on the other members.
How to hire and build a 10x engineering team remains a challenging problem however!
Hell, even by engineering standards, tech has a lot more extremely opinionated people - with more extreme views on pretty much everything. I've always wondered why it is like that.
One or two 'superstar' engineers who had been with the project for more than a decade were the only ones who understood the bulk of it. They had job security!
I often wondered if they intentionally created it to be that way out of self interest. It made things rough for all the 'normal' engineers who wanted to improve things but got pushback from them and management.
Oh and also, it wouldn’t hurt to qualify those skills to the specific domain to which they apply. Like “he’s a really good database engineer” or “he’s a great C# guy, but terrible at DevOps”
These articles are polarizing because they take for original assumption that the real world is discontinuous. That’s stupid.
Let’s praise the engineer that’s in the 2.5x to 7x range.
The costs associated to managing teams without an ambition for excellence are substantial. As far as scaling an org goes, building average teams scales better than having exceptional teams, because by definition, exceptional teams are the exception. But if you work on a project that has winner-takes-it-all dynamics, the costs of average teams are immense.
I really don't get why people argue so much against it. Nobody debates it in sports or music. Not every software project is like the world cup championship. But if you're in a VC market where the winner takes it all, yeah, then it's a lot like music or sports. You want your team to have the ambition to win.
Am I working hard at Meta? You bet I am.
For median SWE salary and 0.001% in “options” that will likely never have a liquidity opportunity? I’m not so sure…
Again, depends on whether your product has that much upside. Many products don’t. But as an example: German car makers have long ignored that great software engineers have a vastly bigger impact in a team than great mechanical engineers. As a result, they for a long time failed to build great software engineering orgs.
Volkswagen gave in eventually and is now licensing from Rivian. Their failure was caused by a structural problem of not seeing how SW works at scale, and how that should influence your hiring.
the winner-takes-all dynamics also would be such a terrible place to work, “the winner” is seldom-to-never a person actually doing the work but VCs and owners and… what is my ambition here? maybe minority in USA but people do not define their lives by their job, it is means to an end. go to work, do your job and then head home for important parts of life. I have always looked for meaningful work that matters and have largely succeeded later in my career but none of that success had anything to do with ambition.
Agree completely, and 10X engineers build such organizations.
They would read the play like Gretzky to know where they had to be ahead of time.
There are companies where 10x engineers make sense, and there are companies where normal engineers are better to have.
One good example is the Commandos, Infantry and Police article from 2004 Coding Horror. (you can look it up, not going to link) Typically the commandos are the 10x engineers. Having them on early in a startup is tremendously helpful. As a company grows to stages where you want infantry and police, having commandos / 10x engineers might hurt more than they help. Of course this isn't always true but this is more likely true than not, in most cases.
We as humans, and particularly in America, like to quantize people and use a single variable to rate how good people are. In reality different people are good at different situations. It's not always the best option to hire for the 10x engineers.
If that was the case then people wouldn’t need to engage in political games the way they do.
One of the traits of this work is that it is almost impossible to measure.
Most time is wasted when you throw away and rewrite what you did.
Very assertive, but almost always incorrect.
In fact, an arguably more important skill is know when not to do something and how to avoid tech debt. Building towards a north star sustainably and incrementally in such a way that pivots along the way don't require major bandaids or rewrites is how a good engineering org operates.
In the real world a lot of 10x engineers end up just launching a bunch of hacky garbage to frontload impact and leave the cleanup for everyone else. This can work for some time in organizations with phenomenal build and test infrastructure; however, it eventually becomes crippling and hinders everyone's velocity.
I like the saying that "engineering is a team sport" and agree that the multiplier should be on the productivity of the entire team as mentioned in the article. The concept of whole being greater than the sum of its parts applies to both engineering systems and technical teams (which we'd probably say is a type of system on its own).
Not meaning to downplay the role of great engineers... I suppose the best scenario would be 10x engineers who can also help the rest of the team perform better.
If you look at virtually all the games programmed from 1975 to around 1995, the programming "teams" were incredibly small. Until the Sony Playstation came out, virtually every videogame was written in assembly with no source control whatsoever. Even PC games like Starcraft (released in 1998) had code review done by printing out the physical code and going over it with a marker [this was about the last time Elon Musk had a programming job cough). There was no source control and graphics APIs (if they existed at all) came in thick manuals.
For context, the credits to the Sonic the Hedgehog, a multimillion (now billion) dollar franchise, had just one "Chief Programmer" Yuji Naka, and 2 "assistant" programmers. Most of the time the assembly code would be incomprehensible to anyone but the person who wrote it. I believe there was very little actual "collaborative" programming going on. The gulf between a programmer who could merely code (which meant moving sprites around in assembly), and someone who could ship an actual game, let alone a decent one, was quite immense. When it came time to develop the first 3d Sonic game for the Sega Saturn, Yuji Naka was busy, and an American team was set to the task. Working 14-20 hour days, and forced to write a 3d game engine on Saturn hardware in assembly (due to the crappy state of C compilers at the time), this team could not ship an acceptable game in the 1 year timespan needed by the company.
I think quiet advances in tooling have made both collaborative software engineering more feasible and more effective compared to the 80s and 90s, where entire multi-million dollar industries by necessity sat on the shoulders of a handful of high skilled software engineers.
If it is around 1 (which doesn’t seem too unreasonable given that multiple people might review a single commit), and a 10x engineer really is 10x as productive as a normal one, then I guess a team of less than 10 people will have trouble keeping up with these 10x engineers.
Unless the company only hires 10x engineers. But then we should at least consider the possibility that they are just hiring 1x engineers, and have a low opinion of engineers outside the company.
I'm not giving up on answering the question. It's an aid for you to answer this question by yourself now from where you are.
Argument in this article feels like advice that key to writing best programs lies in writing functions with average LoC.
> The best engineering organizations are the ones where normal engineers can do great work
But this is entirely compatible with the notion of superstars pulling the whole team forward
> Individual engineers don’t own software; engineering teams own software.
the portion "software; engineering" -- just because the words are adjacent here, even though they belong to separate phrases, are treated as one term and hyper-linked to articles tagged with "software engineering" :
In my mind, the important distinction isn’t so much about the developers themselves, but more the environment that they are developing in.
If your codebase is an inscrutable mess, you don’t have agency to make even minor decisions without slacking 6 people for an afternoon, and there is no documentation on a service you suddenly own, then guess what? You have no chance of being a 10x engineer. You probably can’t even be a 1x engineer!
Then there are also different individual skills (like magnus carlsen is more skilled in chess than me) that are influcened by practice and talent.
Also for a lot of problems experience might be more helpful than intelligence so you dont need to be einstein to engineer a dishwasher (probably).
Good leaders are the key to great teams. Good leaders know how to deal with excessively productive people, and underperforming people, and to harmonize them. A 10x engineer under good management will actually distribute their weight to others, and meet the definition. Without that they're just one highly skilled engineer, engineering.
And this is why some people fear AI
> Charity Majors is cofounder and CTO at Honeycomb.io, a platform that helps engineering teams debug and improve their software applications.
> https://charity.wtf/ Blog, latest article an apologia for DEI, "The diversity of your teams over the long run rests on your ability to build an inclusive culture and equitable policies."... "Don’t underestimate what a competitive advantage diversity can be"
Hmm. Why does no one argue for equitable balance of political views, or religions, or anything to do with ideas at all? Is anyone even measuring ideational diversity? Power-sharing in most countries is principally concerned with it, for example. How many 'inclusive' teams are extremely politically, and ideologically, homogenous?
Clearly there's a apologia for a certain worldview at work here: some sunk-cost investment in a certain notion of inclusion, which is entails (if not aims for) moral and ideological uniformity. Offensive to this notion of 'inclusion' is excellence, since excellence isn't uniform nor even normal -- it's pareto distributed. An excellent runner is exponentially better than a normal one, and sampling uniformly from all groups ("inclusively") produces bad runners.
According to experience, and all evidence, the best talent arises out of healthy competition and cooperation with the best talent -- it does not arise out of uniform, nor even, normal distributions.
If you sample uniformly, then race all against all eventually a powerlaw arises -- and almost everyone is excluded if you want the best. Discrimination based on talent is a ruthless process which cares little for what ought be.
Yes, systems produce excellence by exaggeration of abilities, but this process of exaggeration quickly leaves the normal behind, and is anyhting but inclusive.
Republicans will never be good at leading the EPA, basically.
Probably not, no.
About a decade ago, I worked with a woman who had a PhD in psychometric assessment / quantitative psych. She was crazy smart. She said there have been lots of studies of high performing teams, and of course one of the conclusions people have taken from these studies is that "more diversity is better".
But she said if you actually go and read the studies, its far more complex than that. She said the data actually shows:
- A diversity of backgrounds makes a team more effective.
- A diversity of values makes a team less effective.
It makes sense. Imagine your company sells breakfast cereal. You will be more effective if you have people from a lot of backgrounds because they will understand issues your customers will face. If everyone on your team is wealthy, you might price your product too high. If everyone on your team is poor, you might never consider having a premium version of your product for wealthy areas. If your team only speaks English, you might accidentally give your product a name that plays really badly for Spanish speakers or something. And so on. These mistakes can be avoided by having a team with diverse backgrounds.
But if your team members have different values, they won't get along and your team will become less effective. Say, some people on your team want to make a product thats good for the environment. And other people on the team just want to maximise profit. Then they'll spend their energy fighting about that, and the result is a low performing team, making a confused product thats probably expensive and bad for the environment at the same time. Or, one person on the team wants everyone to like each other and someone else on the team loves competition. They'll inevitably clash. The conflict might result in personal growth - but it'll probably be bad for the team's KPIs this quarter.
In essence, nobody talks about diversity of values because nobody wants it. Ironically, not even DEI proponents.
This is a problem when these values become extremised in a population such that to select for them is to quite significantly narrow the plurality of values which would otherwise well-coexit. Consider, eg., religious communities living together before and after liberalism -- before = civil war, after = human rights. Classical liberalism is an ideology of values pluralism which thereby permits great diversity of ideas.
We should expect high-performing teams to have a diversity of relevant ideas (, and perhaps, ) of irrelevant values.
The concern arises when the benefit to team cohesion arises from an echo-chambre of shared values, at a great expense, of disruptive innovation and ideational diversity. And also, on my part, just honesty about what this sort of moralist is really aiming for -- to be surrounded by people who wish for a very narrow sort of values-homogeneity.
If "diversity and inclusion" were part of the pluralist fabric of liberal tolerance shared by the vast majority of people this issue wouldn't arise -- since then there could be a great actual diversity of opinon whilst values were shared. The issue is how peripherial prioritising these values is, de facto -- and hence how self-regulatingly narrow the "team" has to be.
If the chief value being pushed were "tolerance", such that we had, "tolerance, respect, effort" (, say) as the new moralist fashion -- then almost none would be excluded.
Consider what the impact of making "racism" a team value would be in these terms: how narrowing, homogenising, and the like. And yet, I suspect the number of people keen to work with "people as racist as they are" is not so different than "people as obsessed by diversity as they are".
The first is the idealistic one that employers would like to be the default interpretation: A global hiring pool allows for the best possible experts, with the widest experience. And you need an inclusive culture to ensure that the talent is happy to stay.
The second is the more realistic: A global hiring pool allows for cheaper labour: And you need a culture where speaking out against "inclusivity" is dangerous to the individual, in order to prevent unionist sentiment or political barriers to cheap labour emerging.
The third is a bit more cynical, it's similar to the second but considering a wider scale: If an employer with an easy problem can't access a low cost low skill workforce, then they have to compete in hiring from the high skill one. This means that development is tied up with the financial impact of the work. (You only hire someone if there is expected return). Access to a cheaper labour market makes the price of the work more tied to the difficulty, removing the perception that development is a high value activity.
We also need to decide what we mean by a “10x engineer”. Many people here are describing engineers who “appear to be productive, spewing out shitty code that makes things worse”. The infamous industrious incompetent. This is not a useful definition of a 10x engineer. There is a reasonable definition of a 10x engineer: a 10x engineer creates 10x the value of a 1x engineer over the same period of time. This is the only meaningfully useful definition. Anyone who wants to understand 10x as “damaging spew” is choosing an unproductive definition. I assume such people are 1x engineers. To be a 10x engineer is to be the kind of person who believes that some engineers can be 10x, and then goes about find out how to be that themselves. 1x engineers get caught up misidentifying bad engineers as “10x engineers who are shit” so they can continue to be mediocre.
This is always going to have a critical subjective element to it.
The moment you start treating engineers like factory floor workers, that's what you get.
Time is quantifiable and comparable. Time spent on making things happen and then dealing with the consequences. The percentage of people leaving the organization in their first year is quantifiable.
Tech debt and tradeoffs from the previous feature will show up either as time spent on adding the next one or time spent on fixing bugs. Estimating is difficult, but measuring and figuring out post factum what amount of time was spent on yak shaving isn't exactly impossible. It maybe be uncomfortable and self incriminating, but that's a culture problem.
It's about creating leverage.
So, the great ones aren't lone mercurial artists.
They are the ones who are, in fact, very good at the craft. AND they also got good at writing things down for self/other, and teaching other people what they know, and creating a culture of enthusiastic open-minded curiosity, whether on an IRC channel or in a packed fancy conference auditorium.
Once-in-a-generation brilliance is optional. The rest is not.
e.g. Brian Kernighan will be the first one to tell you that Ken Thompson was in a league of his own compared to Brian. But Brian himself is a 10,000x programmer. How much leverage have his book(s) and software and generous public education created in the world?
Anyone can become a 10x version of themselves (next-year you is radically better than today-you) if they think about that and learn to be like Brian (think, do, self-teach, other-teach, spread infectious enthusiasm).
Edit: clarify prose, and fix embarassing name snafu
Listen, a 10x engineer is someone who does the work of 10 other engineers, not closes 10 times the tickets, not pretends to do 10x the work but really it's just making things more complicated.
Sometimes being 10x means you are extremely careful and you don't have to go back and rework stuff.
Sometimes it means your work unlocks 0.1 extra value out of 100 other engineers.
You can say that 10x engineers just flat out don't exist but it's a whole lot of cope to say that someone who actually gets 10 times as much work done is actually bad because you knew one special boy that was really a disaster.
Boring is the key, the commercial says.
We need exceptional people who can push boundaries and do exceptional work in order to progress.
They are only proud 10x because their narcissistic self looks proudly at 1x engineer in smudge fashion that they are better than someone else.
They are 10x because the system is stable enough and beautiful enough to allow for them to be 10x, and also allow for the 1x engineers to be good enough.
So lets champion the system and the normal engineers out there.
I find them very counterproductive, because instead of discussing actual issues and problems, people spend time justifying by all means that they’re in the “right camp”. Go outside, touch grass and actually talk to people you work in your org. Though I suspect most of those are written by ”influencers”(barf) that easier never worked with real people or don’t work anymore and want to sell their snake oil as ultimate truth.
If you think a great (10x) engineer has bad social skills, isn’t a good mentor, and isn’t a strong teammate… you’ve never actually worked with one. What truly makes someone a great engineer is being technically impeccable and having next-level soft skills.
> Most of us have encountered a few software engineers who seem practically magician-like, a class apart from the rest of us in their ability to reason about complex mental models, leap to nonobvious yet elegant solutions, or emit waves of high-quality code at unreal velocity.
> I have run into many of these incredible beings over the course of my career. I think their existence is what explains the curious durability of the notion of a “10x engineer,” someone who is 10 times as productive or skilled as their peers. The idea—which has become a meme—is based on flimsy, shoddy research, and the claims people have made to defend it have often been risible (for example, 10x engineers have dark backgrounds, are rarely seen doing user-interface work, and are poor mentors and interviewers) or blatantly double down on stereotypes (“we look for young dudes in hoodies who remind us of Mark Zuckerberg”). But damn if it doesn’t resonate with experience. It just feels true.
> I don’t have a problem with the idea that there are engineers who are 10 times as productive as other engineers. The problems I do have are twofold….
I think this is true, but in the metaphorical sense hah. Few with a happy childhood end up this way.
10x devs do not do mentoring and "social skills", because it does not scale. They write readme, maybe record a video, and move on to next task. If you have a question, send email and you get response latter! Sitting all day on meetings kills productivity very fast!
Buttering someone up, just because they are lazy to study documentation, and somehow they have power over you, is not a team work!!!
plus plus plus plus plus to this.
Software is much closer to a competitive race where small improvements in ability give completely outsized returns.
Because it is. Traits like intelligence or dedication really fluctuate during person's lifetime.
> If you have services or software components that are owned by a single engineer, that person is a single point of failure.
If you have a service owned by a person, you have a single entity responsible for this service. If you have a team of 10 people owning a service, each person gives only one tenth of a fuck, making any change take ten times as much time as it should, and there are ten different visions of the project playing out at once.
> The best engineering organizations are the ones where normal engineers can do great work
Strong agree. As an 10x engineer in an organization of 1x engineers, my life is perfect, because I get my shit done in one hour and go home and nobody gives a fuck. In an environment of 10x engineers I'd need to actually work 40h a week.
> Build sociotechnical systems with “normal people” in mind
Valid point. My manager asks me how do I do this that I deliver projects on time, they work correctly, and people are happy to work with me. The answer is simple: I treat everyone like an incompetent lazy fuck. This assumption allows me to create designs that are much less likely to fail.
You can see example of this by studying how big tech works. Usually they replace individual creativity with processes for people who can't think.
> A great engineering organization is one where you don’t have to be one of the best engineers in the world to have a lot of impact.
Not possible. Either you're a 10x engineer, or you're a cog in a big machine. Can't eat a cake and have a cake.
> Don’t hire the “best” people. Hire the right people
This paragraph is just ChatGPT slop.