Comment

Comment by Herval_freire

>Yeah that was an interesting read. I like the concept of a -10x engineer because they definitely exist

I don't believe 10x engineers actually exist. Maybe 1.5x, 2x, or 3x engineers exist at most. 10x is a huge exaggeration of human capability.

Get this, say a project takes a year to complete. The concept is saying a 10x engineer can do this in about month. If such a person exists it will be so rare I estimate that most people haven't ever encountered an actual "10x" engineer. Even a 3x engineer is super rare. I can see something like 2x happening where a project that takes a year is done in 6 months. That is rare but plausible.

You also might get a lead who can ramp up the effectiveness of an entire team by say 3x at most. If the size of the team was N, then it's N*3X. If N is like 4 then it's a 12x increase. This is the closest thing to an actual 10x engineer. But it's not actually a 10x engineer here it's just better management.

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton