The 10X Engineer? More Trouble Than They Are Worth
April 25, 2025
Dinobaby, here. No smart software involved unlike some outfits. I did use Sam AI-Man’s art system to produce the illustration in the blog post.
I like it when I spot a dinobaby fellow traveler. That happened this morning (March 28, 2025) when I saw the headline “In Praise of Normal Engineers: A Software Engineer Argues Against the Myth of the 10x Engineer.”
The IEEE Spectrum article states:
I don’t have a problem with the idea that there are engineers who are 10 times as productive as other engineers. The problems I do have are twofold.
Everyone is amazed that the 10X engineer does amazing things. Does the fellow become the model for other engineers in the office? Not for the other engineers. But the boss loves this super performer. Thanks, OpenAI, good enough.
The two “problems” — note the word “problems” are:
- “Measuring productivity.” That is an understatement, not a problem. With “engineers” working from home or in my case a far off foreign country, a hospital waiting room, or playing video games six fee from me productivity is a slippery business.
- “Teams own software.” Alas, that is indeed true. In 1962, I used IBM manuals to “create” a way to index. The professor who paid me $3 / hour was thrilled. I kept doing this indexing thing until the fellow died when I started graduate school. Since then, whipping up software confections required “teams.” Why? I figured out that my indexing trick was pure good fortune. After that, I made darned sure there were other eyes and minds chugging along by my side.
The write up says:
A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.
I like this statement. And here’s another from the article:
The best engineering orgs are not the ones with the smartest, most experienced people in the world. They’re the ones where normal software engineers can consistently make progress, deliver value to users, and move the business forward. Places where engineers can have a large impact are a magnet for top performers. Nothing makes engineers happier than building things, solving problems, and making progress.
Happy workers are magnets.
Now let’s come back to the 10X idea. I used to work at a company which provided nuclear engineering services to the US government and a handful of commercial firms engaged in the nuclear industry. We had a real live 10X type. He could crank out “stuff” with little effort. Among the 600 nuclear engineers employed at this organization, he was the 10X person. Everyone liked him, but he did not have much to say. In fact, his accent made what he said almost impenetrable. He just showed up every day in a plaid coat, doodled on a yellow pad, and handed dot points, a flow chart, or a calculation to another nuclear engineer and went back to doodling.
Absolutely no one at the nuclear engineering firm wanted to be a 10X engineer. From my years of working at this firm, he was a bit of a one-off. When suits visited, a small parade would troop up to his office on the second floor. He shared that with my close friend, Dr. James Terwilliger. Everyone would smile and look at the green board. Then they would troop out and off to lunch.
I think the presence of this 10X person was a plus for the company. The idea of trying to find another individual who could do the nuclear “stuff” like this fellow was laughable. For some reason, the 10X person liked me, and I got the informal job of accompanying to certain engagements. I left that outfit after several years to hook up with a blue chip consulting firm. I lost track of the 10X person, but I had the learnings necessary to recognize possible 10X types. That was a useful addition to my bag of survival tips as a minus 3 thinker.
Net net: The presence of a 10X is a plus. Ignoring the other 599 engineers is a grave mistake. The errors of this 10X approach are quite evident today: Unchecked privacy violations, monopolistic behaviors enabled by people who cannot set up a new mobile phone, and a distortion of what it means to be responsible, ethical, and moral.
The 10X concept is little more than a way to make the top one percent the reason for success. Their presence is a positive, but building to rely on 10X anything is one of the main contributing factors to the slow degradation of computer services, ease of use, and, in my opinion, social cohesion.
Engineers are important. The unicorn engineers are important. Balance is important. Without out balance “stuff” goes off the rails. And that’s where we are.
Stephen E Arnold, April xx, 2025
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