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.
Someone imagining they are brilliant doesn’t make them brilliant.
More so if in the light of day their work sucks.
Discussions about 10x engineers are not about “wannabe 10x engineers”.
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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 by “create some” you mean “Identify a major new revenue stream” or “Investigate something everyone else considers great, improve it 10x and save hundreds of millions of dollars”, then yeah, that’s what I do.
I've seen more of what someone called "wannabe 10x" making a career of turning non-10x problems into a series of 2 year Greenfield project pitches and failures to launch across multiple firms. You can actually see people pull this off for 6-10 years before they need to do something more productive.
Oh for sure. I’ve seen people get promoted based off the possibility of the bullshit idea they’ve come up with, and then move on before reality kicks in.
Wait... "Most" 1x engineers? "Most" in any profession will be average. Which is completely normal and fine.
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...
Their very next line also used "Most 10x engineers". Neither of those are talking about "most" in the profession, it's "most" in the subgroup. Average in the profession will be somewhere in between.
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?
Are there any open source repositories where this is an example? I keep hearing the 10x people ruin everything but I wouldn’t call that person 10x. I don’t understand how it’s objectionable that some people are more productive than others.
I have a buddy that helped me out with some DIY/construction projects. He thinks he is a 10x as well since he gets so much done so quickly. He will finish up and sit down saying its done. I go look and every tool is literally everywhere, garbage and debris thrown about, and half the stuff is incorrectly installed as he didn't think he needed to read the instructions and missed key details.
You're fine no worries. I think you are making my point.
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.
Katt from trpc, mantine lead developer, Tanner from tanstack, Anders from typescript, Jose from elixir, antires from redis. There plenty of 10x dev examples.
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
The question is in how they're productive. If they're productive because they're effectively cutting corners and leaving a wake of tech debt others have to clean up then they are productive while slowing down their team (or worse, the company) as a whole.
Anyone that has been doing this job knows that the majority of average developers in any workplace will also cut corners every once in a while and leave a lot of tech debt to others, with very few exceptions.
This myth that more productive developers are somehow worse and will ruin projects is just rationalization without any ground in reality.
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.