10x Engineer Jokes

10x engineers

Founders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly.

OK, here is a tough question.

How do you spot a 10x engineer?
— Shekhar Kirani (@skirani) July 11, 2019

On July 11th this tweet thread started, and ever since “10x engineer” has been an ongoing topic of humor & memes on Twitter. The gripes range from what appear to be nothing more than sour grapes, to very legitimate critiques of the itemized list of attributes that follow it. I’ll try to avoid the sour grapes and get right to the more valid critiques:

I've seen engineers seduced by the siren song of some new magic technology end up delivering little business value at high cost.
And a few projects (not as many) where it actually pays off.
— Stompy Spring Robot (@jwatte) July 13, 2019

Having worked with a whole spectrum of capable people I can agree with the “bot” & add that the really good ones, are actually scared-to-death of “anything new” because the hype usually doesn’t live up to the reality. “anything new” gets the attention of non-technical decision makers and salespeople. “anything new” comes up in board rooms and power point presentations. The really good programmers know what works and if “anything new” comes along that is good, they’ll know a network of folks that can validate that it’s worth the effort before devoting any brain-power to it. The real trick to being awesome and productive is not getting caught up in fads and kludges.

Bugs are purposeful inventions created by 10x engineers to secretly find the (10 – n)x engineers that they will allow to transcend.
— V# (@nwaafo_ngwa) July 13, 2019

Absolutively! I’ve known plenty of folks that saw a ticket and immediately declared: “I know what that is!” However, the idea that someone has memorized every line of code is ludicrous because the productive folks have written thousands of lines of codes over years if not decades! Opara drives the point home by pointing out how ridiculous it would be for them to leave these bugs laying around.

https://twitter.com/TayCaldwell/status/1150168123162558465

I am certain that caffeine has nothing to do with programming skills because I don’t touch the stuff. Nuff said.

Well… which is it, are they full stack or do they rarely do UI work?
— @mike.puterbaugh.net (@mike_puterbaugh) July 14, 2019

No joke, a + b + c != d. That combination of sentences was what we refer to as cognitive dissonance.

this is true of everyone, most people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses who make their life miserable. This is true of mcdonalds, programmers, executives, sales people, everyone.
— Teao (@Questionor) July 14, 2019

Agreed Teao, everyone down to a 1x anyone deserves respect and civility. .5x? Not-so-much.

Now, to balance things out, I’d like to take issue with a few of the criticisms:

This is utter malarkey. No engineer of any decent level of competence converts “thought into code”. Typically, one writes out her/his solution in pseudocode or represents it as a diagram, before even opening the text editor, let alone writing a single line of code.
— lex (@aalevkov) July 13, 2019

Sorry “lex” but you’d probably have more than 6 followers if you knew that pseudo-code is for training and whiteboards. I’ve honestly never met one of these “engineer of any decent..” people you speak of. I’ve worked on & with small to gigantic teams, and unless they were a complete n00b or dealing with some recursive mess trying to outsmart themselves they rarely-if-ever regressed to academic approaches to what is for most an artistic talent.

I don't know what's scarier – the profile of the engineer described in the thread or the fact that there might be people who believe this shit!
— Lochemem Bruno Michael (@agiroLoki) July 13, 2019

I’ve worn out a few keyboards in my time, but I replace them… so I guess I’m again disqualified, however the would-be-Sensei has a point here. It is grueling to work with someone who doesn’t know at least a few shortcut keys and that taking a few minutes to adjust their IDE settings is worth the effort.

By now I’m sure I’ve lost most of you to the comments on these different threads. That was one viral post, and Mr. Kirani has trolled with the best of them. My last piece of advice, if you’re still with me… If you do fancy yourself a “10x” anything, you probably need to keep it toned down a bit. At least try to help some folks learn some things… otherwise you kinda suck at life.