• Article Origin and Editions: Originally commissioned by Luca Rossi for refactoring.fm on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version emphasizing "10x engineering teams" and it was later picked up by IEEE Spectrum with a different, shorter piece. This is the author's personal edit, containing source material for talks.
• "10x Engineer" Meme: Many encounter engineers with exceptional skills. The "10x engineer" meme is based on flimsy research and often has ridiculous claims. While there are engineers more productive than others, it's not an immutable characteristic and no one is 10x better in every situation.
• Measuring Productivity: Measuring productivity is fraught and imperfect. There are many factors like skills, experiences, tools, and stages of development to consider. People and their skills are not static; an engineer may be 10x in one skill set but average in others.
• Software Ownership: Engineers don't own software; teams do. The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. A single engineer owning software is a single point of failure. As a company grows, ownership should be handed over to a team for resilience.
• Great Engineering Orgs: Truly great engineering orgs are where normal engineers can do great work. They don't rely on top-heavy staff or ex-FAANG employees. Normal engineers with decent skills can make a big impact. Great orgs also mint world-class engineers.
• Thinking as "Normal": Many technical people focus on being smart kids. But most are normal people with specialized practice. Great engineers are made, not born. Thinking of ourselves as normal can be humbling but is beneficial.
• Building Sociotechnical Systems: When hiring and building teams, focus on both exceptional and normal aspects. Normal people have cognitive biases. Design systems for normal engineers to pour their brilliance into the product.
• Turning Normal Engineers into 10x Teams: To enable normal engineers to move fast and deliver great results, shrink the code-to-live interval, make it easy to roll back mistakes, make the right thing easy and wrong thing hard, invest in instrumentation and observability, devote engineering cycles to internal tooling, build an inclusive culture, have diverse teams, and assemble teams from different levels.
• Measuring Productivity: The only meaningful measure of productivity is impact on the business. Engineering is about solving business problems, not writing code. Senior and intermediate engineers are the workhorses.
• Great Orgs and World-Class Engineers: Great engineering orgs mint world-class engineers. Top performers are attracted to places where engineers can make progress. But overemphasis on finding "best" people reinforces prejudices.
• Hiring the Right People: Place less emphasis on hiring the "best" people and more on the right people. Build an environment where people are hired for their unique strengths and inclusivity is a given. Such an environment attracts engineering talent.