The more I work with high performance teams and individuals, the more I realize the value of creativity. It can be creativity in technical solutions; it can be creativity in managing complex constraints; it can be creativity in connecting the dots and identifying multiplier projects.
When faced with difficult problems, there is a very large difference in effectiveness between engineers. And it's not a one-dimensional scale, a brilliant engineer in one area can be quite average when solving different types of problems due to lack of context/domain knowledge/experience.
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
With the utmost respect: how do you concretely, even by anecdote, translate creativity or lateral thinking into winning against serious, well-resourced competitors?
I tend to agree that lateral thinking can be a real advantage, but the vagueness of both OP and this post sort of grind my gears.
Who won against unfavorable odds and how?
azornathogron 39 days ago [-]
WhatsApp (somewhat famously) had a very small engineering team, but was successful enough in the messaging space for Facebook to buy them. And it's not like instant messaging was a field with no other working solutions before WhatsApp arrived; it succeeded despite the incumbents.
I don't know if this meets your criteria for winning against unfavorable odds or not, but it does seem like that team was punching far above their weight class.
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
That’s a great example of a small, dedicated team exploiting edge to win big. I was fortunate enough to meet one or two of those folks post-acquisition (and I think the consensus is “great buy Mark”).
If you were on that team I would be absolutely riveted to learn more.
Were you on that team?
grog454 39 days ago [-]
> "great buy Mark"
Am I interpreting this correctly as sarcasm? If so, it seems to suggest that the product was overvalued, the acquisition a mistake, and the "success" more to do with luck or duplicity than "lateral thinking", "high performance individuals/teams", or similar ideas brought up by the OP.
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
WhatsApp is one of the best acquisitions (at least from the acquirer’s perspective) in the history of technology.
disgruntledphd2 39 days ago [-]
Yeah, it created massive dominance for the acquirer, regardless of how little money it made.
azornathogron 39 days ago [-]
I was not, nor am I anywhere near that level!
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
Don’t sell yourself short!
Those folks were bright hackers to be sure, but these days the best marker of a bright hacker or someone who intends to be is that they hang out on here.
You can look up my join date if you want, it’s a long time ago, but when I joined up on here I was green as grass and in this field experience, practice and hard work are at least as important to outcomes as native talent.
If you ever want to bat an idea around: ben dot reesman at gmail.
classified 39 days ago [-]
> the best marker of a bright hacker or someone who intends to be is that they hang out on here.
You had me up to this point. Great satire!
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
I’m sarcastic a lot but my parent comment was completely sincere.
analyst74 38 days ago [-]
In my humble opinion, the key is to focus on solving problems for your key customers.
Most breakthrough progress I observe come from doing things that are conventionally considered impossible, low impact or just bad decisions. But the person/team had an insight to make it possible and wildly profitable.
If you look around, it happens all the time. Google famously made search useful; TikTok found an edge in low quality short form videos, despite all existing major players concluding high quality long form videos is the way.
Keep in mind that the contrarian vision and initial implementation is just the start, they needed continued investment and innovation to stay ahead of competitions, or get copied and leapfrogged.
patches11 39 days ago [-]
The Innovator's Dilemma has a ton of examples of this.
kqr 39 days ago [-]
This is true for the simple reason that having many points in the solution space to select from increases the likelihood that a more optimal point can be selected.
In my experience, high-perming teams are those which are built to allow creativity. High emotional safety to express ideas and concerns, evidence-driven reasoning, dedicated time for experimentation, open discussions on just about any topic, nobody pulling rank to get their will done, etc.
Good leadership, consequently, is nudging people toward being that sort of collaborator.
Critically, I believe all people are creative. Or rather, useful creativity is a serendipitous meeting between situation and person. Whenever I'm at a loss for how to solve a problem, asking more people has always been the right answer. There's always someone who can think of a high-value solution to a tricky problem, and it's almost never the person I'd expect to.
Of course, this requires that your goal is to solve problems effectively. For many people, the goal is playing politics and looking good. Then you want the opposite approach. Keep information to yourself and force others to go with your ideas.
javajosh 39 days ago [-]
I've always been surprised at how readily people accept that "leadership" or "team" are concepts that can be successfully abstracted from a specific project, mission or circumstance. I had a friend who was obsessed with reading about leadership - but when I asked him what he actually wanted to accomplish, he had no idea. I felt, and still feel, that he (and people like him) were putting the cart before the horse. Leadership comes with huge trade-offs, especially if you're a technically capable creative, which makes it something to put off as long as possible. You only assume a leadership role when you have to. You've got to want to accomplish something big, such that you need (many) other people's help, and so you must be willing and able to organize that help. Anything other motive strikes me as empty status chasing.
Perhaps the closest thing I've seen to a "lab" that might begin to experiment intelligently with abstract leadership ideas is something like YC, which is in position to iterate on the expensive, difficult, messy game of tech business leadership, because they have a privileged position to see what works, what doesn't, and what the limits of those observations are. And I would bet that even after ~2k companies (or whatever it is) no-one in their right mind at YC would think they've seen it all. They have, at best, a set of good heuristics. Not great, just okay.
From the IC perspective, high perf means the ability to modify the product quickly and surely, while making practical trade-offs using sound judgement about the larger context of the work, by manipulating the code and code meta data (e.g. bugs and features). These systems are highly complex especially analyzed across ~20 dimensions of performance, and success often means guessing which dimensions to care about and which to leave to their own devices. If there is a systematic error mode in an IC its when your prioritization scheme is wrong because it's ossified, or because you're unlucky.
thewarrior 39 days ago [-]
“Empty Status Chasing” is a pretty important motivator for a lot more people than they’d admit in public. Status correlates with wealth, fame and opportunity.
ozim 38 days ago [-]
I read that "empty status chasing" of parent poster like martial art fake black belts or stolen valor people.
Buying kimono and black belt does not make one good at martial arts - reading about leadership will not make someone a leader.
Which makes me think about Dwight Shrute type of people.
noisy_boy 39 days ago [-]
> Leadership comes with huge trade-offs, especially if you're a technically capable creative, which makes it something to put off as long as possible. You only assume a leadership role when you have to.
I have noticed a combination of examples that confirm and reject this. Speaking for myself and some of the colleagues whom I consider good developers: none of us want to deal with the official responsibility that comes with being a leader so we don't want to step into that role. On the other hand our manager is an excellent developer and super sharp individual and he seems to have boundless energy for leader-type activities - the kind that just thinking about makes us feel weary. My (unsubstantiated) theory is that it comes down to a combination of culture+work ethic+ambition+grit: just putting one's head down and getting stuff done, irrespective of whether it is creative or enjoyable. Of course, our manager gets paid very very well so that, at least partially, makes up for the trouble.
javajosh 38 days ago [-]
Your comment got me thinking about training to be the captain of a large sea vessel. In that case there's certainly are many things you can learn to be an effective captain and manage a crew regardless of where you're going. I'm wondering if that doesn't apply to software startups as well. The kinds of behavioral lessons you have to learn to be an effective leader have always struck me as somehow dishonest and manipulative, but maybe that's not quite right. It is certainly more conscious behavior more goal-oriented behavior and that increases the risk of inauthenticity. But I can see how learning certain techniques and guidelines could help in general.
I suppose at the end of the day I'd like to understand how you can read a manual like "How to win Friends and influence people" while still maintaining high standards of quality and integrity. Because it seems like most people read books like that and become spineless manipulative dishonest people. I've come to prefer the honest, harsh judgments of technologists to the constructed speech you often get from leaders. I would be thrilled to work with a leader who can somehow square that circle.
hlplan 39 days ago [-]
10x engineers do exist, yes, and they do write clean code. If others don't understand it, it is because they have no domain knowledge or interest.
Even in web pages, compare the slickness of lichess.org to chess.com. The former is elegant, individualistic and non-corporate, the latter has the hallmark of too many meetings and divided "team" work.
We get that sometimes management labels a code slinger a 10x engineer, especially if he is also good at conference presentations. This, however, is not the definition on HN.
I've certainly seen more group efforts turn into Rube Goldberg machines than efforts of single persons. The group may understand the Rube Goldberg machine, tell management that the code is perfect, but it is still horrible for outsiders (sometimes deliberately).
lmarcos 39 days ago [-]
I think it's not a good comparison. Lichess is a non profit, accepts donations and has a benevolent dictator. So it's evident that its design, structure, and ux/ui has been on charge of a single individual.
Whereas chess.com made 2 million USD in revenue last April. Obviously, with that revenue, you have dozens of individuals pulling in different directions wanting to prove themselves and trying to make the platform "better".
So the former is a bazaar. The latter a cathedral. Non comparable.
ajross 39 days ago [-]
> So the former is a bazaar. The latter a cathedral. Non comparable.
Isn't that exactly the comparison being made? A "10x" engineer can build a cathedral alone that does what you would otherwise have to hire a whole bazaar of engineers to replicate, at much higher cost.
(Pedantry: You're actually confused on the metaphor here. The Cathedral and the Bazaar was about development methodology, not individual performance. In fact a centralized, corporate product like chess.com would almost certainly be labelled a "Cathedral" by ESR. A "bazaar" is a project built of high-value individual contributions regardless of origin. Whether lichess qualifies or not, I don't know.)
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
It’s not pedantry to point out that GP has directly and completely contradicted the original essay. I’m no ESR fanboy (there are better places to get a blend of has-been technical commentary and cunnilingus HOWTO), but the whole BDFL routine is cathedral all the way, with the possible exception of Linux.
cmeacham98 39 days ago [-]
My understanding is that is the point they were trying to make. Thibault Duplessis ("ornicar") is the '10x engineer' behind lichess.
sib301 39 days ago [-]
Also, it’s subjective. I have hundreds of games on both platforms, and I prefer chess.com.
jakespencer 39 days ago [-]
If you are interested, I would love to hear your thoughts about this. A couple of years ago (Queen's Gambit time frame) I downloaded the app for lichess and have hundreds of games on it. I chose lichess more or less because it was non-commercial. I have a few acquaintances that prefer chess.com, but I have honestly never given it a fair shake. Chess.com looks very commercialized to me, and I feel like I am being upsold whenever I visit the site or open the app. But most of the chess streamers seem to be active on chess.com and not lichess, and some people seem to greatly prefer chess.com. What do you prefer about chess.com vs lichess?
kzrdude 39 days ago [-]
Streamers are paid to use chess.com, though.
titanomachy 39 days ago [-]
I haven't been on lichess in a while, but I do remember being very impressed by the software.
blagie 39 days ago [-]
1) I've been a 10x engineer, a 1x engineer, and a 0.1x engineer. A lot of this is situational and about fit.
2) I've been at startups that need 10x engineers, and ones which don't. There are technically boring problems to be solved 10x engineers won't work on (and won't be 10x at). Many of those can be very lucrative. There are technically hard problems which will never be solved without a 10x'er.
I hate this kind of generalization and generic advice. If you're writing a medical patient record management system, the right toolkit, organizational structure, recruiting, etc. is very different than if you're doing build an autonomous robotics startup, which is in turn different from writing a mobile operating system, which is different from a mobile, social video game.
routerl 39 days ago [-]
Let's not forget that "fit" includes management. I've worked with people who were building something mundane but acted as if they were writing avionics software; there just can't be 10x engineers in that context, because there's a fundamental mismatch between vision and mission; people who would be good don't get recognized, and bullshiting self-promoters will always shine (until the house of cards collapses).
blagie 39 days ago [-]
My experience with those contexts is that there can't be 10x engineers, but not really for that reason. 10x engineers do well in contexts where there are _hard_ problems. There really aren't 10x engineers for _messy_ problems. Most mundane systems aren't _hard_ but _messy_, especially with regards to customer requirements. These include most:
- Inventory management systems
- Employee records systems
- Health care records systems
- Etc.
Most of this work is about:
- Managing legacy tools and systems, much of which is diving into some complex mess for a few days to change one line of code
- Managing odd-ball one-off use-cases. If the customer has coupon code X, and is in Minnesota, do Y. If an employee was laid off on the last day in February in a leap year, do Z. Etc. These glum on and make spaghetti, and a lot of coding is just about getting stuff like this done.
- Long, boring meetings
- Documentation and, if you're lucky, test infrastructure
- ... and so on.
Technical performance matters a lot less than a whole bunch of other skills, and in most cases, hiring criteria are often "has a pulse." Most such systems use an "enterprise" stack (e.g. Java+Oracle or Microsoft tools).
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
Depends on how you define management. On the best teams I’ve worked on the gal with the title actually knew the details and managed them.
I’ve worked on teams where there was a hood ornament manager and the real manager, usually carrying a Tech Lead semi-title.
Interestingly enough I’ve seen both be effective, but it’s a hell of a lot easier in the former case.
more_corn 36 days ago [-]
I’m only 10x for about a minute at a time. Really good places draw that out of me repeatedly.
The rest of the time I just try to slog through the work and maybe take a moment here and there to be a 1.1x strategist.
I try to get all my mentees to be brilliant for a minute a day and just show up and complete all the work the rest of the time.
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
It’s all relative: I’ve never worked on a team that beat RenTech in the market. I’ve worked on a team that in certain verticals kicked Google’s ass up between their ears on advertising. Is that a “high-performing” team?
The thing with these fluffy observational posts is that it’s rarely if ever concrete: here’s the Goliath to our David, here’s the advantages we leveraged to get the drop on the better-resourced, ostensibly smarter competitor, here’s how we opened the door with the slender bit of the wedge, and this is how we maintained cohesion and momentum to ram it right up Goliath’s ass.
Anything short of that is fucking whiffle-ball and is a waste of pixels on HN’s front page.
Let’s hear the actual story about how your scrappy and creative and cohesive group left the big enemy with a broken jaw. Otherwise, yawn.
tomxor 39 days ago [-]
> The thing with these fluffy observational posts is that it’s rarely if ever concrete
In a word, it's subjective.
As we move through life we humans enjoy extracting pithy and broad nuggets of wisdom from our experience as we introspect. Occasionally they are even generally true! But as I've grown a little less naive I've come to appreciate that most broad observations, as convincing as they may appear, are usually incredibly subjective - to the originator (among which I include myself) they make 100% sense, but devoid of the context from which they derived (as they are often presented) they are usually little more than noise.
It's the horrible gnarly truth of the world that we must become comfortable with to stop making these oversimplifications. </ armchair philosopher>
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
It’s only a little subjective.
Getting a job at RenTech is easier than winning the Nobel or Turing, but harder than getting a job anywhere else.
Getting a job at hardass backend FAANG is easier than getting a job at RenTech, maybe about as hard as getting into an Ivy with undistinguished parents.
Hitting that top 1-3% performer at FAANG is harder than completing a PhD at Stanford or Cal, but easier than selling a YC startup for 500MM+.
People want it to be subjective so that 0,0 can be in sight of wherever they are, but I know damned well that I’d flunk a RenTech interview, and even more so that I’ll never win the Turing.
thewarrior 39 days ago [-]
How did your team kick Googles ass at advertising. Any lessons you can share ?
benreesman 38 days ago [-]
There’s a bunch of technical auction theory and ML stuff that’s semi-germane, but mostly it was Sheryl breaking ranks with a wage-fixing cartel. Google and Apple and Pixar and a dozen other companies have been found guilty in court of various “no poach” arrangements and other wage suppression collusion, and so here comes Sheryl offering twice the TC and raising the hiring bar accordingly. FB in 2008-2012 was harder to get into than Harvard and paid better. So we were better, and the novelty of the situation created a camaraderie that had everyone sleeping at the office with the singular focus of putting Vic G out of a job.
There’s a lot of structural nuance and important details but it was an absurdly elite group of people who hadn’t been disillusioned yet and we forced Google’s jaws open wide enough that there are now 2 panopticon ads businesses instead of 1.
Antonio García Martínez wrote a great book about it called “Chaos Monkeys” if you’re a long-form reader.
A high performing engineer is someone who has above average technical capabilities and also above average social aptitude, IMO.
If you can schmooze with stake-holders, explain esoteric subjects to non-technical people in a simple manner, and are pleasant to be around, _on top of_ being able to grok basically any code, you're "10x"
benreesman 39 days ago [-]
Comp-structure would beg to differ. Being able to do technical work that few others can gets you 5-20x the median.
Being able to navigate the Byzantine hallways of high-stakes executive politics, even more.
Being able to do both without flashing a “neuro-atypical” badge in any public way? You’re making 10-50MM a year.
Consensus around here tends to be that’s a lot more than 10x. So unless the market is utterly busted (which implies an exploitable arbitrage), the notion of a “10x” engineer is way low.
What do you reckon Carmack makes when he chooses to work? I bet it’s a lot more than 10x the median.
dieselgate 39 days ago [-]
I read once in an article that a “10x engineer” is someone who empowers others around them to be better, thus creating a “greater than the sum of its parts” kind of dynamic.
So that’s just another way to think of it in addition to the purely technical and other areas
kzrdude 39 days ago [-]
I'm a firm believer in that any team that actually works together is greater than the sum of its parts. Teamwork is simply a quality multiplicator, we don't produce great work in a vacuum.
mstipetic 39 days ago [-]
This is what mediocre engineers that go into management keep repeating
vitabenes 39 days ago [-]
The Steve Jobs effect.
gtqz 39 days ago [-]
z3t4 39 days ago [-]
It can be existential to a startup to get a good engineer that can get an MVP up in two months, versus a big team that takes 3 years to create the same MVP.
The next two hires also need to be good. Then the 4th hire can be a specialist, they do not need to be better at anything - they are just there so that your champion(s) can keep produce 3 golden eggs per day instead of 1 golden egg plus 2 clay eggs, because you do need those clay eggs.
Great engineer = 1 golden egg per day, or 3 clay eggs per day.
Average engineer = 1 clay egg per day, or 10 days for a golden egg.
To maximize productivity you hire average engineers to produce the clay eggs.
pineconewarrior 39 days ago [-]
This reads a lot different for me now that work is more remote. I am running into a LOT more bad coworkers now. Likely people taking two remote jobs and scamming us.
If people do this it will be obvious to future employers.
lordnacho 39 days ago [-]
Classic comment on HN is that guy claiming to make 1.5m a year doing 10 jobs.
kzrdude 39 days ago [-]
That's an interesting way to be a 10x engineer then
sibeliuss 39 days ago [-]
I am too and its really upsetting me. At my current company I've noted three separate individuals who are clearly scamming the system. Never saw that before remote work took over.
akomtu 39 days ago [-]
Imo, you have to choose between high perf 10x devs working in silos or a mediocre, but predictable team work that uses 10x as many devs to accomplish the same. The business wants to see a 10x dev as someone who "enables others to achieve more", but that's bs - 10x devs despise messy people problems and instead concentrate all their energy in one field. Nearly all geniuses were jerks on personal level.
When faced with difficult problems, there is a very large difference in effectiveness between engineers. And it's not a one-dimensional scale, a brilliant engineer in one area can be quite average when solving different types of problems due to lack of context/domain knowledge/experience.
I tend to agree that lateral thinking can be a real advantage, but the vagueness of both OP and this post sort of grind my gears.
Who won against unfavorable odds and how?
I don't know if this meets your criteria for winning against unfavorable odds or not, but it does seem like that team was punching far above their weight class.
If you were on that team I would be absolutely riveted to learn more.
Were you on that team?
Am I interpreting this correctly as sarcasm? If so, it seems to suggest that the product was overvalued, the acquisition a mistake, and the "success" more to do with luck or duplicity than "lateral thinking", "high performance individuals/teams", or similar ideas brought up by the OP.
Those folks were bright hackers to be sure, but these days the best marker of a bright hacker or someone who intends to be is that they hang out on here.
You can look up my join date if you want, it’s a long time ago, but when I joined up on here I was green as grass and in this field experience, practice and hard work are at least as important to outcomes as native talent.
If you ever want to bat an idea around: ben dot reesman at gmail.
You had me up to this point. Great satire!
Most breakthrough progress I observe come from doing things that are conventionally considered impossible, low impact or just bad decisions. But the person/team had an insight to make it possible and wildly profitable.
If you look around, it happens all the time. Google famously made search useful; TikTok found an edge in low quality short form videos, despite all existing major players concluding high quality long form videos is the way.
Keep in mind that the contrarian vision and initial implementation is just the start, they needed continued investment and innovation to stay ahead of competitions, or get copied and leapfrogged.
In my experience, high-perming teams are those which are built to allow creativity. High emotional safety to express ideas and concerns, evidence-driven reasoning, dedicated time for experimentation, open discussions on just about any topic, nobody pulling rank to get their will done, etc.
Good leadership, consequently, is nudging people toward being that sort of collaborator.
Critically, I believe all people are creative. Or rather, useful creativity is a serendipitous meeting between situation and person. Whenever I'm at a loss for how to solve a problem, asking more people has always been the right answer. There's always someone who can think of a high-value solution to a tricky problem, and it's almost never the person I'd expect to.
Of course, this requires that your goal is to solve problems effectively. For many people, the goal is playing politics and looking good. Then you want the opposite approach. Keep information to yourself and force others to go with your ideas.
Perhaps the closest thing I've seen to a "lab" that might begin to experiment intelligently with abstract leadership ideas is something like YC, which is in position to iterate on the expensive, difficult, messy game of tech business leadership, because they have a privileged position to see what works, what doesn't, and what the limits of those observations are. And I would bet that even after ~2k companies (or whatever it is) no-one in their right mind at YC would think they've seen it all. They have, at best, a set of good heuristics. Not great, just okay.
From the IC perspective, high perf means the ability to modify the product quickly and surely, while making practical trade-offs using sound judgement about the larger context of the work, by manipulating the code and code meta data (e.g. bugs and features). These systems are highly complex especially analyzed across ~20 dimensions of performance, and success often means guessing which dimensions to care about and which to leave to their own devices. If there is a systematic error mode in an IC its when your prioritization scheme is wrong because it's ossified, or because you're unlucky.
Buying kimono and black belt does not make one good at martial arts - reading about leadership will not make someone a leader.
Which makes me think about Dwight Shrute type of people.
I have noticed a combination of examples that confirm and reject this. Speaking for myself and some of the colleagues whom I consider good developers: none of us want to deal with the official responsibility that comes with being a leader so we don't want to step into that role. On the other hand our manager is an excellent developer and super sharp individual and he seems to have boundless energy for leader-type activities - the kind that just thinking about makes us feel weary. My (unsubstantiated) theory is that it comes down to a combination of culture+work ethic+ambition+grit: just putting one's head down and getting stuff done, irrespective of whether it is creative or enjoyable. Of course, our manager gets paid very very well so that, at least partially, makes up for the trouble.
I suppose at the end of the day I'd like to understand how you can read a manual like "How to win Friends and influence people" while still maintaining high standards of quality and integrity. Because it seems like most people read books like that and become spineless manipulative dishonest people. I've come to prefer the honest, harsh judgments of technologists to the constructed speech you often get from leaders. I would be thrilled to work with a leader who can somehow square that circle.
Even in web pages, compare the slickness of lichess.org to chess.com. The former is elegant, individualistic and non-corporate, the latter has the hallmark of too many meetings and divided "team" work.
We get that sometimes management labels a code slinger a 10x engineer, especially if he is also good at conference presentations. This, however, is not the definition on HN.
I've certainly seen more group efforts turn into Rube Goldberg machines than efforts of single persons. The group may understand the Rube Goldberg machine, tell management that the code is perfect, but it is still horrible for outsiders (sometimes deliberately).
Whereas chess.com made 2 million USD in revenue last April. Obviously, with that revenue, you have dozens of individuals pulling in different directions wanting to prove themselves and trying to make the platform "better".
So the former is a bazaar. The latter a cathedral. Non comparable.
Isn't that exactly the comparison being made? A "10x" engineer can build a cathedral alone that does what you would otherwise have to hire a whole bazaar of engineers to replicate, at much higher cost.
(Pedantry: You're actually confused on the metaphor here. The Cathedral and the Bazaar was about development methodology, not individual performance. In fact a centralized, corporate product like chess.com would almost certainly be labelled a "Cathedral" by ESR. A "bazaar" is a project built of high-value individual contributions regardless of origin. Whether lichess qualifies or not, I don't know.)
2) I've been at startups that need 10x engineers, and ones which don't. There are technically boring problems to be solved 10x engineers won't work on (and won't be 10x at). Many of those can be very lucrative. There are technically hard problems which will never be solved without a 10x'er.
I hate this kind of generalization and generic advice. If you're writing a medical patient record management system, the right toolkit, organizational structure, recruiting, etc. is very different than if you're doing build an autonomous robotics startup, which is in turn different from writing a mobile operating system, which is different from a mobile, social video game.
- Inventory management systems
- Employee records systems
- Health care records systems
- Etc.
Most of this work is about:
- Managing legacy tools and systems, much of which is diving into some complex mess for a few days to change one line of code
- Managing odd-ball one-off use-cases. If the customer has coupon code X, and is in Minnesota, do Y. If an employee was laid off on the last day in February in a leap year, do Z. Etc. These glum on and make spaghetti, and a lot of coding is just about getting stuff like this done.
- Long, boring meetings
- Documentation and, if you're lucky, test infrastructure
- ... and so on.
Technical performance matters a lot less than a whole bunch of other skills, and in most cases, hiring criteria are often "has a pulse." Most such systems use an "enterprise" stack (e.g. Java+Oracle or Microsoft tools).
I’ve worked on teams where there was a hood ornament manager and the real manager, usually carrying a Tech Lead semi-title.
Interestingly enough I’ve seen both be effective, but it’s a hell of a lot easier in the former case.
The rest of the time I just try to slog through the work and maybe take a moment here and there to be a 1.1x strategist.
I try to get all my mentees to be brilliant for a minute a day and just show up and complete all the work the rest of the time.
The thing with these fluffy observational posts is that it’s rarely if ever concrete: here’s the Goliath to our David, here’s the advantages we leveraged to get the drop on the better-resourced, ostensibly smarter competitor, here’s how we opened the door with the slender bit of the wedge, and this is how we maintained cohesion and momentum to ram it right up Goliath’s ass.
Anything short of that is fucking whiffle-ball and is a waste of pixels on HN’s front page.
Let’s hear the actual story about how your scrappy and creative and cohesive group left the big enemy with a broken jaw. Otherwise, yawn.
In a word, it's subjective.
As we move through life we humans enjoy extracting pithy and broad nuggets of wisdom from our experience as we introspect. Occasionally they are even generally true! But as I've grown a little less naive I've come to appreciate that most broad observations, as convincing as they may appear, are usually incredibly subjective - to the originator (among which I include myself) they make 100% sense, but devoid of the context from which they derived (as they are often presented) they are usually little more than noise.
It's the horrible gnarly truth of the world that we must become comfortable with to stop making these oversimplifications. </ armchair philosopher>
Getting a job at RenTech is easier than winning the Nobel or Turing, but harder than getting a job anywhere else.
Getting a job at hardass backend FAANG is easier than getting a job at RenTech, maybe about as hard as getting into an Ivy with undistinguished parents.
Hitting that top 1-3% performer at FAANG is harder than completing a PhD at Stanford or Cal, but easier than selling a YC startup for 500MM+.
People want it to be subjective so that 0,0 can be in sight of wherever they are, but I know damned well that I’d flunk a RenTech interview, and even more so that I’ll never win the Turing.
There’s a lot of structural nuance and important details but it was an absurdly elite group of people who hadn’t been disillusioned yet and we forced Google’s jaws open wide enough that there are now 2 panopticon ads businesses instead of 1.
Antonio García Martínez wrote a great book about it called “Chaos Monkeys” if you’re a long-form reader.
High Performance Individuals and Teams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25118762 - Nov 2020 (73 comments)
If you can schmooze with stake-holders, explain esoteric subjects to non-technical people in a simple manner, and are pleasant to be around, _on top of_ being able to grok basically any code, you're "10x"
Being able to navigate the Byzantine hallways of high-stakes executive politics, even more.
Being able to do both without flashing a “neuro-atypical” badge in any public way? You’re making 10-50MM a year.
Consensus around here tends to be that’s a lot more than 10x. So unless the market is utterly busted (which implies an exploitable arbitrage), the notion of a “10x” engineer is way low.
What do you reckon Carmack makes when he chooses to work? I bet it’s a lot more than 10x the median.
Great engineer = 1 golden egg per day, or 3 clay eggs per day. Average engineer = 1 clay egg per day, or 10 days for a golden egg. To maximize productivity you hire average engineers to produce the clay eggs.
If people do this it will be obvious to future employers.