The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did not deliver on time, the parent companies would not be paid.
At the end of the project, half the code delivered was his. Had he not been on the project, it would not have been completed on time, so no product would have been delivered. [Edit: Thus, it is not really the line count that makes him a 500x engineer.]
So your 500X engineer knows a 5000X engineer and he wrote as much code as 999 other engineers combined? (That would make him a 999X engineer, FWIW)
A 500X engineer (per your measurements) would have to write 500 lines of code every day without fail, while all 500 other engineers in the entire company could only average 1 line of code per day. And the 5000X engineer they know would have to write 5000 lines of code per day while everyone else was only limited to 1 line of code per day.
Not just one day, but every single day for six straight months. And all of their managers would have to somehow not notice this disastrous situation for the duration of the project. Come on.
I think you've been fed some exaggerations.
- Bill Gates
I have never seen a program design specification that even attempted to quantify the lines of code of the end product, let alone be accurate.
I do not doubt that the numbers were rounded for simplicity. It is meaningless to talk about a 499x engineer.
As was explained to me, this engineer assigned two-week work units. If the work was not ready at the end of two weeks, he wrote it himself over the weekend. So, a fair bit of code was written that did not make it into the final product.
Using no code or knowledge from the past 2 weeks?
Proof: Pick B to be an engineer with productivity 0. 0 * X = 0 for all X. Productivity of A is defined to be positive, so is greater than 0. Hence productivity of A is greater than X times the productivity of B.
Are you HR, by chance? Have you ever coded something in your life?
I was half of a very productive duo on a greenfield project subsystem - a project I joined midway: my partner wrote a lot of code, I estimate ~70% of final lines in the code base were his. What the LoC count won't tell you is all the refactoring, deletion, tests and error handling code I had to add, because his code only worked for the happy path. Can you say he was being 2x more productive than I was? I say no, because he was breaking the nightly build at least once a week before I joined, blocking the rest of the team, this ended when I added pre-commit tests.
I agree. I'm only arguing that there are times when engineers who enable "10x/100x" engineering don't get the visibility they deserve, sometimes until after they quit.
This hits close to home for me as I witnessed my partner being showered with praise for being "super productive" based on LoC alone, code which wasn't close to being production-ready. If you don't care about code quality, and want to be seen by management/people outside of your team as a 10x engineer with minimal effort: you can follow the same playbook.
if you deliver the product only by taking shortcuts that impede other engineers you do not get credit for ‘delivering’ the product.
having been the next engineer to come along, this attitude drives me up a wall.
The latter I've seen. A lot. The former I have not.
I have also seen -10x engineers. Generally the best you can do is stay well clear.
I am also implying the likelihood of it being that, rather than from a particular perspective an organizational detriment looks like a personal positive (somewhat akin to the 'heroic' team constantly responding to pages in production for their services; not like that lazy team that only works 8 hours a day and never gets paged), seems low. As mentioned, when one person seems to be doing all the work, yeah, it might be they're just amazing, or it might be that the project is badly managed, and so the work can't actually be distributed well. Both can also be true.
I too have seen -10x engineers. Interestingly, others in the company also saw them as +10x. Someone who was the silo for a notoriously difficult part of the system was viewed by management as amazing (after all, he just went and got things done! They could focus their attention elsewhere!). When I then had to dig in, with actual production requirements, I found nothing really worked, nothing was designed well, nothing was documented, and the person was impossible to work with.
Having a 10x engineer(or even worse, a 500x engineer in this alleged case) is a huge risk for the company, should the engineer want to leave or if they are incapacitated in a tragic event, the company is severely handicapped, ideally a so-called 500x engineer should spend less time writing the actual code and instead mentoring/managing others to scale up their knowledge, should the company do this right, they might not deliver on time, but they'll have a much wider array of experts when something breaks or for the next projects, reduces overall company risk and it's more profitable in the long run.
