Comment by earthnail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by earthnail | Hacker News Reader

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The thing that bugs me with this article is that a lot of regular software engineering is plagued by a lack of ambition. 10x engineers bring that ambition (I hate the term 10x, but let's just stick with it). Because of the scaling effects in software, if you work on the right project, that ambition can significantly increase your impact on the market/world/field you're working in.

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.

you are making a whole lot of assumptions here that might be true in your experience but might be far from truth as a whole. over the almost 3 decades hacking I have had the pleasure of working with many 10x-ers and all but one were the least ambitious people you will ever meet. not sure how you can in general relate someone being awesome at what they do with being ambitious?

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.

Yeah maybe if my employer has the ambition to pay.

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…

Agree with that, but for employers to understand that it’s worth paying it’s necessary to understand that you would actually get more value in return as an employer than the extra you have to spend on a great engineer.

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.

A small team of skilled engs hurts managers’ careers - they want large teams

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