Recently this article showed up in my feed, and I suddenly became obsessed with the (post-trending) notion of 10x engineer.

At year 2 in my professional career, my aspiration is to become a 10x engineer (in case you are interested, year 0 was to get a job, year 1 was to keep my job and maybe get promoted).

So what exactly is a 10x engineer? Since the notion is based on relative comparison, there could be two interpretations: well above average engineering productivity in the software industry or well above average engineering productivity in the team. The former is hard to measure, as teams/companies can be drastically different from one another. The later is interesting, and its safe to say that it does happen (as mentioned in the article). My guess is that two things can happen if a 10x engineer suddenly shows up: it increases the average team productivity and shrinks the gap (2x at most), so you end up with the 10x engineer and many 5x engineers; or it renders the 1x engineers obsolete, at that point you lose the baseline and thus 10x doesn't exist.

Writing software is like playing games, if you stick to the right principles you will be good at it and win; if you don't you can still play and win the game, you just die a lot more often and get frustrated and restart. I have been playing ghost of tsushima lately and it strikes me how similar it is to writing software. You can take out the boss with 100 moves, or you can take out the boss with 10 moves. Either way you defeat the boss, but the difference is 10x.

Here are my final thoughts, 10x engineer is just a myth, an urban legend (e.g. jeff dean). But when you spot the rare breed, learn as much as you can.