10x Engineer

My ex-friend was kind of that person in college. He single handedly managed to almost get himself a rustication from the college over the accusation of hacking remotely into the college system, turned that whole situation around into an opportunity and became the only student working with college administration and re-writing the whole SSO and putting MFA which was built from scratch. The guys also worked on the college app which was later handed over to the student team he built and legitimised with the student body for maintenance and minor development. Also worked on re-writing the election voting system used by the student election bodies, and an e-application management system to remove paperwork for any college related work during covid and also did open source contribution all this while (all projects are live and we're deployed by him on almost bare metal server of the college, so no dummy projects here). Currently he is doing a PhD in internet networking in the US while being from a non CS branch in college. Unfortunately from a human standpoint the guy is a big narcissist (like legit he and I tested ourselves and he got 98/100 in the test for narcissism). I didn't mind his actions towards other people much until one day the bullet came back to bite me and I had to shut him out of my life forever. Definitely a 11/10 guy if we remove the personality stuff 🙃

I had a TL who's a 10x engineer. He could grasp concepts from other teams with ease. He understood code from other people as good as his own. His communication was kind of weak - he preferred prose over example or pseudo code. However he put in the hours and resolved everyone's questions on his methods if it took a long discussion. So nobody was complaining for long.

He was also a brilliant code reviewer and always had a more efficient way of implementing things - low level (eg bitset instead of vectors) as well as high level. He put forward points about scalability and clean code which would often convince you to redesign.

It was a great learning experience. We worked together for almost a decade. However it stunts your own growth. I was the top contributor at my level 3 times over a course of 9 years but I could see that further growth would need me to create an impact which I wasn't able to under him. I, like many of my coworkers, eventually switched jobs to be able to contribute original ideas instead of feeling stupid for being the second best. My manager thought I'm being stupid but I was losing my confidence and was at risk of becoming lazy.

In short, 10x devs are not always good for a team. They can lead to high attrition.

I am one and there are four more in my team

AMA, I am a 10x engineer. Probably.

Iam 0.3x

I know a game dev by passion who hacked his college website and got expelled because he told them.

Made pretty decent games but didn't get enough traction as an indie dev.

Now he's working at gitlab in Amsterdam living his best life. Still doesn't have a degree afaik.