> The best explanation of the concept and its basis the article “Productivity Variations Among Developers and Teams: The Origin of 10x” by Steve McConnell. Here are the key things to know about “10x engineers”:
> 10x refers to the difference between the best and worst developers, not the best and average.
The cited article is using a different definition of 10x engineer than I'm aware of. There's hardly a limit to the worst and I'd believe 100x or 1000x variation with this interpretation. In fact the worst are negative so don't even work on this scale.
If you had kept going down the list, you'd see this:
> The studies only compare differences among developers who actually complete the task.
> Their figures don’t take into account the people (~10% in some studies) who didn’t even finish. Nor can they take into account the real-world cost of software that is nominally completed but is so buggy, flaky, or hard to maintain that it has to be rewritten by someone else."
> 10x refers to the difference between the best and worst developers, not the best and average.
The cited article is using a different definition of 10x engineer than I'm aware of. There's hardly a limit to the worst and I'd believe 100x or 1000x variation with this interpretation. In fact the worst are negative so don't even work on this scale.