10x Engineer

About

10x Engineer is an internet slang term referring to a software engineer who is ten times better than their peers, typically in terms of productivity or quality of work.

Origin

In January 1968, a paper titled "Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance" by Sackman, Erickson and Grant was published in Communications of the ACM,^[2] which presented data showing that the ratio of performance between the worst and best programmers was 10.

Spread

On June 25th, 2007, the software engineering blog Haacked^[1] published a post titled "10 Developers For the Price of One," which discussed the idea that some software engineers are so much more productive with their time that they are essentially worth the same as 10 other engineers.

On January 8th, 2016, software engineer Erik Bernhardsson published a post about 10x engineers to his personal blog.^[4]

On June 2nd, 2018, an article titled "How to Become a 10x Engineer" was published on Medium^[3] by user Team Codegiant.

On March 21st, 2019, YouTuber TechLead uploaded a video titled "What is a 10x Engineer (feat. ex-Google Tech Lead)," in which he analyzes the concept of the 10x engineer (shown below).

Shekhar Kirani's Twitter Thread

On July 11th, Twitter user @skirani^[5] tweeted a thread about the defining characteristics of 10x engineers (shown below). Within one week, the first tweet in the thread gathered upwards of 4,400 likes and 1,400 retweets.

In the coming days, numerous Twitter users tweeted jokes about the concept of the 10x engineer (shown below).

On July 13th, Twitter user Cassidy Williams tweeted a comedy video titled "Life as a 10x engineer" (shown below). Within five days, the video accumulated more than 264,000 views, 7,700 likes and 1.400 retweets.

Search Interest

External References