How to get yourself a real 10X developer
The 10X developer meme has been around for a while. The rockstar who can singlehandedly transform an entire team, an entire department, due to his or her almost supernatural coding powers. Their output and their impact is so outsized that they can deliver 10 times the value of a ‘normal’ developer.
This is often roundly mocked, and in many cases rightly so, as an executive fantasy. A mythical unicorn that managers and the C-suite dream of, and use as an imaginary stick with which to scorn and chastise their ‘regular’ engineers when yet another project is behind schedule, another sprint overruns and requests for time to pause feature work and pay down tech debt start piling up.
“If only we had a team of 10X developers, our problems would be solved”.
That all being said, I believe there are such things as 10X developers.
The scale of talent is non-linear. Individuals can have a 10X, 50X, or 100X impact on a business compared to someone else sitting in the same seat. That’s because humans are unique and brilliant, and so the right human with the right mindset can achieve incredible things.
The issue is that people, and often management, see achieving nonlinear returns through linear means. You might be able to double your output through sheer hard work and willpower (probably unsustainably), but 10X-ing it? Impossible.
That means how you increase your impact, structure your work, and choose what to focus on cannot look anything like the 1X level. This is a problem for many executives and managers, who still can resort to outputs like lines of code, PRs and hours worked as a marker of an engineer’s output. But these are linear. You cannot 10X these to achieve the outcomes you want.
So how do you get 10X engineers? Start with yourself. Ask what it would take to 10X your current status quo. Once you’ve got that target, ask your engineers what they would need to do to support 10X more users, process 10X the number of transactions, whatever it might be. Those who get excited by the challenge, whose eyes light up with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation?
Those are your 10X engineers.
Inspired by the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x.