Your 50x engineer may be able to build a highly performant and complex algorithm by themselves, truly in a week where other engineers might take a year.
But 99% of programming isn't that. It's CRUD apps and configuration files and debugging browser quirks and hunting down race conditions etc.
Your "50x engineer" probably isn't going to be all that faster solving a CSS bug or putting together an online order form or configuring Apache.
So even if companies could identify programming geniuses... they mostly don't have genius-level work to give them, so there's no use in paying 50x anyways.
They may think the engineer who fixes 10 bugs a week is their best asset. But what about the engineer who quietly created high quality code with very few bugs, that's extremely easy to maintain?
A "10x engineer" gets that distinction because their software provides dividends in quality and maintainability for years and years, even if the initial implementation took them a seemingly long time. But management often just sees the engineer who's closing the tickets the fastest, even if that person's code becomes a curse on the company for years to come.
It doesn't help that so many teams are focused on 2 week sprints and quarterly goals. That kind of work favors a certain type of engineer, and incentives short term solutions.
People generally reserve "10x engineer" who really do have the intellectual capacity and stamina to crank out 10x the amount of code of the same quality as a median engineer.
I think it's important not to confuse the two.
And in software optimization, speeding up a program 2x usually requires 10x more resources. This is why I think the 10x concept still makes sense here.
I think the real 50x engineer is a person who is a strong engineer, also does design, innovates, and can build a business like a CEO. That person could actually bring 50x value to a small org.
I myself am the sole developer for a B2B software company with $5M ARR.
I'm not 50x (or even 10x) and don't think those designations are based in reality, but your second sentence doesn't follow from the first.
A company has a bunch of other stuff that had to be in solid alignment to "win". Engineers have to be working on the correct problems to begin with to add exponentially more value.
It's not as simple as "crushing" the sprint points assigned rather chosing the problem set ... If chosing the problem set then it's leadership or founders which can be rewarded at 50x.
So I, as a team owner, can watch Strasbourg pitch, see him nullify my lineup, then I have almost all the information I need to know he really is a lot better than average.
Additionally, by being willing to pay more and getting him on my team I'm depriving my opponents of his talent.
There is no direct analogue in programming, besides maybe open source projects.
> If you’re a software engineer, you would probably agree with what Steve Jobs said.
I am and I don't. I've yet to see even a 10x engineer. I've seen people who are more than 10x within a very narrow domain, but when you include the whole system and all their responsibilities, no one comes close to 10x.
SW development is not just coding. The other aspects of it are harder to scale in performance. Amdahl's Law is very relevant here.
This is a gross misunderstanding of both software and amdahl's law.
Amdahl's law just states that the serial parts of a program stays the same as more cores are used for the parallel parts of a program. This also means that the percentage of time the serial part takes becomes larger as it stays the same and the overall running time goes down. It is not an incredibly mind blowing or insightful observation.
It is also assumes certain aspects can't be split up.
Multiple programmers means more communication (synchronization). If anything amdahl's law is an argument that having less but better programmers is much more effective than having more average programmers.
- Communicating with customers
- Writing documentation
- Testing (be it automated or manual)
- Other stuff that may seem bureaucratic but nevertheless are essential (paperwork, tending to CI, tending to HW, etc).
This stuff (or at least some of it) is harder to scale. You can scale up the coding part quite a bit, but the overall process of SW development is held back by the above. You're not going to find someone who is 10x when it comes to talking to customers. Often managers will find the so-called 10x programmer and assign him to duties to maximize output, and have someone else do the work above. But he's still not a 10x overall, as he is simply not doing the work of other developers. That's why I said "within a very narrow domain".
Now if you can get a 10x developer who can scale all aspects of the job, then sure - pay him/her 10x.
You probably don't sit with them in the lunchroom, but folks like Steve Jobs might.
Sure, but can I replace 50 average engineers with one of them, and get the same output?
Never.
The challenge is that to successfully cash out, ALL the pieces of the company have to work together and effectively to some degree.
It's the single best demonstration that company/product success is a team effort.
In theory, yes. However if you look at Google and FB a lion's share of their revenue is through ads. Yet they employ thousands of engineers and pay them extremely handsomly to chase all sorts of projects and moonshots most of which are inconsequential.
My favourite hypothesis is that they keep the smartest engineers hand-cuffed in gold and ask them to dig-a-hole-fill-a-hole just so that they don't go somewhere else to build a competing product. They succeed by and large. In India for instance a small/medium startup has no chance in hell to match Google's total comp, let alone other perks. Not only is cash and RSU handsome but also they get yearly RSU refreshers. The kind of money Google pays just blows my mind.
But if they're still valued that years later, you've done something wrong. (You as in the team.)
I agree with a lot of what you said but this part isn't true. I've been in conversations where people were bragging up that they were able to hire away Person X after >2 years of convincing. It definitely felt like know a guy who knows a guy though, not some open market.
There's probably thousands of ICs at those companies who have delivered millions in recurring value, though. At Google scale, a single engineer could deliver 8 figures in value or more.
If you want to extract 50x you'll need to be a people manager. And in my experience, most 10x+ engineers are really bad at leading people. It's hard to be amazing at engineering and amazing at people management.
BTDT but I don't pretend it's my magnificent skills (although I'm good), it's just the luck of the draw with stock compensation. I'm just as good in other jobs where the stock performance has been lackluster.
Your value is 10% of the worth of the total value you're creating or somewhere between $100 to $200/hr, maybe even as high as $400/hr for rare skills.
2) Sometimes 10x or 50x or whatever Nx is not really what it's thought to be.
I've had to deal with the aftermath of some "10x" engineers and it's not always pretty. Now you can say that this just means we aren't measuring properly, and the person wasn't really 10x (more like -100x in fact, that minus before the 100, in case you missed it, is for "negative" as in negative 100x) but there are still people around thinking this person was 10x, because they still think highly of the elaborate and tightly integrated ongoing catastrophic disaster fountains he planted in the code base.
But then... yes there are some real 10x engineers. Again this is misunderstood though. I think many people can be 10x (or 50x) engineers, depending on circumstance. It's not always about the person. It's the right context plus the right person.
Star athletes are paid for their ability to fill a stadium and or sell advertising/media rights. Part of their value is their celebrity and name/likeness. They are more equivocal to entertainers in this context. Of course, ability matters, because winning teams are celebrated!
Software developers do not bring this value to their organizations.
https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...
It goes on and on. This is just Pando's reporting: https://pando.com/tag/techtopus/
But it is true that the actual bests are 5 to 50 times more productive. I've seen it mainly with specialized consultants. Need to fix your tool chain? You can be sure that the build master consultant will be worth every pennies to fix those obscure C++ linking errors. Need to patch the kernel and even send the patch to Linus? Again, I wouldn't be surprised if you get a 100x ratio compared to a mid seniority dev who never did that.
From my experiences, the high productivity ratio between low end devs and high end devs stem from the multiple multiplicative factors that goes into making programming more efficient. Knowing how to automate repetitive work with scripts, typing fast and having a good knowledge of the appropriate tools and frameworks will help each other exponentially.
Another way to view this is that programming sometimes is like solving a math problem. A top-tier mathematician can solve a difficult math problem 100x faster than an average person. 100x is even a bit understatement because most people can’t even come up with any solution given long enough time. For sure, programming is not solving math problems, but they have some similarities. But this is a way to conceptualize it.
> For example, one of the top MLB pitchers, Stephen Strasburg, received $38M in 2019, while the average salary in MLB was $4.3M.
This isn't the right comparison. If Strasburg is the number #1 baseball player in the world, it makes sense for him to max 10x the median MLB player who would be the ~500th best baseball player in the world. I'm sure the #1 best paid programmer in the world easily makes 10x - 1,000,000x the median programmer when you account startup equity.
And people who aggressively jump between FAANGs at high levels can get $1M+ offers and counteroffers.
1. Mr. Gross quit in September but didn't join Microsoft until after a three-month sabbatical to plan his wedding, Borland said. According to the suit, Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
No. I don't. I do believe that Jobs was being hyperbolic.
This article would seem to imply that most managers are 0.1X:
> In fact, you can see how hard it is to evaluate a software engineer from the process of big tech companies. The most common technical interview process for programmers is to ask them to solve very challenging programming questions.
Your engineers are already solving very challenging programming problems. If you can't work with that, you shouldn't be in management. Part of your job is to evaluate skills and compensate accordingly. If you can't manage that, you are a 0.1X manager.
If the company fires the engineer, the engineer doesn't gain any further profit from the code he wrote.
To put a real value on the work of a heterogeneous pool of developers is way harder than it looks. One will only value the contribution of what 'he/she' values as important. But the quality of a software come from the strength of many that focus on different things. Even the person who is not really good, but is the only one that bring a 'team spirit/team work' brings value to a team.
