The .10x Engineer

By definition, the average developer is a 1x Engineer. And everyone has heard about the 10x Engineer. Some wonder if they’re a myth, or real, which we’ll discuss in a moment. But today I wanted to introduce the .10x Engineer. It’s just a subtle dot, but it makes 100x the difference.

Most of the 10x Engineer skeptics think they don’t exist because they either have a very high perception of the 1x Engineer, or because they think it means a single Engineer has the output of 10.

Without joining the discussion of wether that’s possible or not, let me tell you how I define 10x Engineer, and why they definitely exist. A 10x Engineer is an Engineer that produces 10x the output of a single Engineer, not by itself, but by making other engineers more productive. Note how making 10 other engineers twice as productive you’re de facto a 10x Engineer, even if your output in isolation is 1x.

You’ve probably started thinking about someone you know. They are usually great communicators, they leave very actionable feedback, They are the one you assign to review your PR whenever you can. They write code for humans and not machines. Does that person fit the description I’m giving you? Well, there you have your 10x Engineer.

If you don’t know anyone who fits the criteria, let me tell you, they exist. I’ve worked with a few of them.

On the other hand, a .10x Engineer is not necessarily a bad Engineer in isolation, they can in fact be amazing! Note the difference between the specimen I’m presenting here, the .10x Engineer, and the just-bad one, which I’d denominate 0.1x Engineer. A mathematician would tell you they’re the same, but trust me, they aren’t.

You might ask, how is it possible that an amazing Engineer in isolation can result in a .10x output? You can probably guess it already. They drag down the output of the Engineers they interact with.

Some of the traits they have are just the opposite of the 10x Engineer. For example, they are bad communicators, leave very ambiguous feedback, you don’t like it when assigning them as reviewers.

They write code for machines and not humans. They are usually so intelligent that they’re able to understand complex code without struggling. They can’t see how that almost-minified code with all the tricks the language supports is incomprehensible by they unimpressive peers. Every decision they make, every line of code they write, every ambiguous comment they leave in a PR, is evidence of their superior intelligence.

The build their own library replacements for the 30k-starred Github repo because there’s one open issue that’s very annoying to them. They might add they looked at the code and it’s quite unimpressive –I think this is their favorite adjective–.

The 0.1x and the .10x Engineers have another huge difference, despite what arithmetics tells you. Everyone in a team knows a 0.1x Engineer is just bad. But if you don’t interact directly with a .10x Engineer them, they look like a 10x Engineer!

I mean, all the code they write, all the features they ship, they’re really impressive.

It’s no so easy to spot how much they drag everyone else down. But there are some traces we can look at. Some subtleties that tell us someone is not a 10x, but a .10x Engineer.

First of all, everyone will avoid any task that’s unequivocally going to be reviewed by this person.

Second, when the task can be reviewed by someone else, even when they just tangentially touched the code in the past, the non-.10x Engineer will be the reviewer every single time.

Third, every time they review a task, because someone just didn’t have a way out of assigning the .10x Engineer as a reviewer, the PR will stay open for much longer than any other PR. It doesn’t matter the size, it doesn’t matter the scope. The code they found is just unimpressive, and it should not make it into the codebase. Merging that PR would be insulting to their own code.

Please, if you manage a team, look for these 3 signs. They’re subtle, but you can find them if you know what you’re looking for. If you detect a .10x Engineer in your team, please, don’t hesitate to let them go.

If you have a boss to which you need to explain your intentions, they might freak out.

You said WHO?? That’s one of our best Engineers! Look at everything they’ve shipped!!

Explain them how easy it is to mistake a .10x Engineer for a 10x one if you don’t have to deal directly with them. I wish you luck.

Once you succeed your team won’t have to avoid them, you’ll ship faster than ever, and you’ll thank me later.