I worked with a 10x developer once, he was awful and I couldn't stand to work with him. Although he could produce an insane amount of code and functionality his presence was like throwing a grenade into the middle of the dev team everyday. He left to take a job at google and the overall team productivity went up significantly. He basically did 10X individually,but took 11x away from the team. So team work is pretty darn important.
I've worked with 10x programmers, and while certainly a lot of their value is simply their ability to write code, they also have a lot of value because they help other people excel. The 10x programmers I've worked with are people who push for code reviews, better tools, proper testing, realistic timelines, good communication with clients, etc.
And in the long run, those programmers made the programmers around them better. A 10x programmer creates a lot of 2x-5x programmers. I'm maybe a 3x programmer and it's because a lot of 10x programmers have taken the time to help me get better.
> How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up.
We have a guy in our onsite team that keeps making our user facing application suck with his changes one day and then fix those every other day. So lots of git commits but limited productivity in the team, and a very tough maintainence task for every developer in the team.
I think you're misunderstanding what "10x developer" is supposed to mean. The impression I've gotten is that they are considered to be 10 times as productive because of the work they don't do. They write code that has less bugs, is more scalable, requires less refactoring, is easier for other developers to understand, etc. You'd never see it in LOC or sprint points completed, but there'd be a noticeable difference of pace between a project of 10x devs and a project with 1x devs.
I wanted to reply to all the comments so I just decided to reply to my own comment. For those telling me I'm misinterpreting what a 10x dev is, I don't think a solid definition of the 10x developer actually exists it's mostly in the eye of the beholder.
I think it's mostly in what other people think of them especially that guy that hands out raises. So it's incredibly subjective.
I say a 10x developer is someone that can create features 10x faster than everyone else, regardless of their other skills.
To be clear my dream rockstart software engineer is not a 10x developer. They are 5x developer, a 5x Team player, 5x architect and 10x Mentor. So maybe we need a dictionary of terms around what people by various nicknames and concepts given to the various kinds of software developers.
I agree everyone has their own definition, but the one you are giving is a pointy-haired definition, where the only metric is LoC and a successful demo of some feature.
Even though it's hard to measure a lot of things like technical debt, architectural benefits, bugs, edge case handling, UX polish, teamwork, etc, it doesn't mean that you can reasonably get away with discounting those effects when you talk about 10x. The 10x is referring to productivity, which is implicitly a net measure (gross productivity is just activity, and no one willingly pays for that).
So yeah, you can be 10x in terms of cranking out working code a lot faster (rare), but if that is blowing other people up then it's not meaningful to say they are more productive, in fact it's extremely harmful to risk putting them on a pedestal like this in front of clueless management. For me, true 10x is more intangible than cranking out functionality, it's more about the ability to reconcile the details with the big picture, and zeroing in on solutions that solve the most problems and create the fewest. How this actually looks in practice varies from project to project, but I think it rarely correlates with sustaining a 200wpm typing speed for 8 hours a day.
impressmyself.co , It probably won't be up until next week sometime though. I have to figure how I want to write the blog post, and then actually do it.
Those exist too. It's possible to be really good at something but to be so awful at everything else that the net effect is zero to negative. But not all "10X developers" are assholes.
