The Real 10x Engineer

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[@Assassin_Droid]

Turning a youtube short into a full length video with mid roll ads is a 10x developer move

[@zackfoster3208]

10x youtuber* move

[@MrSnivvel]

There were ads? I never see ads. But then I use Privoxy and uBlock Origin on harder-faster-better-stronger mode.

[@electrolyteorb]

Literally

[@guardianvalor962]

Honestly, this how actual react content should be instead of just sitting there in the corner using 95% of the video.

[@sakurad49]

install ad blocker and bam, you are divine

[@dakata2416]

Turing a 30s Short into a 8min video. Now thats a 10x dev.

[@shauas4224]

You could even say 16x dev

[@SimGunther]

That's what I call a 16x engineer. Truly one of a kind!

[@RobWence]

Careful boys he's treading on Asmon's territory now :D

[@madmaxieee]

@@shauas4224 real programmers know that's a 0x10 x dev

[@nius3774]

@@madmaxieeeThere are 10b types of people that read your reply.

[@MrAdBounty]

"It's my library" is the ultimate dev flex 😂

[@nigelhill74]

That line slayed me!!!!!! 😂😂😂

[@rawallon]

That to me is the funniest, because given the JS ecosystem, You just know that has happened at least once

[@caspera3193]

Guy at my job pulled that flex trice

[@idiomaxiom]

He wrote it the day before but its entirely unrelated to their use case.

[@Thebrainymonkey]

The 'it's my library' bit reminded me of a friend of mine that went for a job interview and the guy asked him why he didn't have some specific Microsoft networking qualification or something. He said, "I wrote the exam for the qualification".

[@RomanQrr]

My programming teacher once told a story about how he interviewed for a local startup. When the 3 interviews asked him for his qualifications he said "Well... I taught you programming, and you programming, and you programming."

[@computerfan1079]

That's an insane flex

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

​@@computerfan1079 But it won't please a corporate box ticker. Qualification missing, denied!

[@oscarhalse2026]

@@RomanQrr That's one of those things that might sound badass, but in reality it's just a really a obnoxious way to say that. A propper flex would be to drop the sassy and condesending delivery and just state that he was a lecturer in x and y college/uni courses. That's enough. That's all the show, and none of that Ron Swanson "I know more than you" attitude.

[@thesun___]

XD

[@Dahras1]

"10x more lines, 10x more bugs, 10x more jobs." Bars

[@2an_sound]

yeah that was hilarious

[@Gornius]

16x times the detail

[@ErazerPT]

That's optimistic... bugs don't increase linearly with LOC's, it's exponential. And the exponential rise in bugs will need an exponential rise in developers to fix them, which will write even more code and... (Microsoft|Oracle|Apple|Facebook|Google|SomeotherTechGiant) became a monster.

[@piko1032]

Based

[@TheAcademik]

True. Watchout Kendrick

[@tears_falling]

i think the mac mini one was supposed to say that he optimized the performance in such a way they didn't need x amount of VMs in AWS anymore, and could run their entire stack on a single mac mini

[@JeremyAndersonBoise]

The only 10x move in the whole video and only you and I seem to have caught it.

[@mitigamespro8757]

@@JeremyAndersonBoise Well writing a library that a lot of the tech world talked about in a day is also a 10x move.

[@jamess.2491]

Doesn’t matter if it’s unscalable

[@lovedeepsingh8026]

@@jamess.2491 nahh man put that on a mac mini with k8s cluster and see the scalability sky rocket

[@Ikxi]

well the 10 users won't notice​@@jamess.2491

[@vikiettruong2260]

The 10x dev really used the "skill issues" card when addressing code readability questions. This broke me since I can't really counter that. =))

[@XDarkGreyX]

Life is a skill issue if you rly think about it

[@stsam63]

I agree so hard with this, I have had people force me to use legacy style code because they were not as familiar with it, this is in reference to the lambda style switch statements in C# in comparison with classic switch statements. the "non readable is really just not familiar" hits hard

[@tsyf1]

Having been in teams where there's a skill gap between me and others, I take the possible skill level of the maintainers into consideration and either program differently or write comments to make it easier to understand.

[@0xCAFEF00D]

I remember being just a moderately experienced programmer and feeling very entitled to my own aesthetic preferences. Once I was even so dumb that I found python list comprehension ugly and convinced someone to stop using them. I hope they're doing well (no shot). Point is sometimes it's actually just skill issues.

[@chawza8402]

@@0xCAFEF00D oneliner comprehension is fine, but I found some nested comprehension on internet (i was doing Pytorch stuff) and it was horible to understand

[@TheChillBison]

"If it ain't broke -- it can be." 🤣

[@tylermfdurden]

"Can we make this readable?" "Charlie, we've been meaning to talk to you about your illiteracy"

[@astral6749]

This guy managed to create an 8-minute video out of a short.

[@fergalhennessy775]

hes just a 10x engineer at heart 🤣🤣

[@frankpalladino2512]

He's a 10x youtuber

[@natedavidoff668]

ok panda

[@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatca]

SSL stands for Secret Spyware Layer

[@PhilippBlum]

"It is my library" That gave me PTSD soo hard. I worked with a co-worker who invented his own Actor library . . . in Java. As if there aren't enough actor libraries in Java. Of all the languages . . .

[@i_zoru]

he's not a competition anymore, but rather a final boss

[@monkemode8128]

I did this accidentally... lol. But it was because I didn't know what existed, but at least I got to learn about threads

[@thegeniusfool]

A 10x developer generates 10x fewer lines.

[@JeremyAndersonBoise]

I tend to agree.

[@jamess.2491]

Lots of people in this comments section miss this point lmao

[@aviewerofu]

These 10x "engineers" who solve problems that didn't exist but they created for themselves are what companies like Adobe and other "we create problems" companies need.

[@brainites]

Perfect!

[@Salbeira]

A 10x Engineer is a person you put into a place where ought to be 10 people but you just leave that single guy there and let him do his thing.

[@stanislavmilchev3054]

no thats not it

[@JeremyAndersonBoise]

Aka disaster waiting to happen

[@coplepk04]

omg "it's my library" fucking killed me

[@komerczka]

They also rewrite stuff because procrastination... its like... if you do clean your house instead of actually important tasks which you have assigned to sprint ... you would never do it because you hate cleaning house, but you just dont want to do whats actualy priority and at least he can say "I did something why so mad bro" xD

[@ericmyrs]

The 10x engineers flip a coin every time they boot. It it's heads they will make your day in an impressive fashion. If it's tails, they wreck your day impressively.

[@timmy7201]

The senior on my workplace, is a 0.1x engineer... All the solutions he cooks up, are somehow te buggiest and most jank I've ever seen in my life! But he's the longest working dev at our company, so management always listens and trust his approach. I usually end up rewriting code over the weekend, to make things actually work for a change...

[@stanislavmilchev3054]

Tom mentioned

[@cbg4567]

Maybe you don’t understand the implications of

[@timmy7201]

@@cbg4567 I do understand the implications of a potential lawsuit, when clients are discontent as the product they paid for is down 95% of the time...

[@hanswoast7]

This will only change when people see this. By fixing his mistakes, you shove them under the rug. You enable this setting by helping. Only letting derail it visibly will drive change. Pain is needed.

[@timmy7201]

@@hanswoast7 We've tried that! If I don't fix it my way during the weekend, then our senior tells us the next week how to solve all the issues his way once again... The more our senior gets involved, the more things become an endless s*** show of never working jank architecture and spaghetti code... So it's easier to just write it twice, usually during the workweek, if that's not possible then during the weekend...

[@drxyd]

I once shrunk a module down by + 50% whilst adding new features and validation to boot, sometimes things just need to be rewritten.

[@sorcdk2880]

This reminds me of a time where I was teaching still in their early parts a new programming concept, and after they had written multiple files with that concept to solve the example problem I also showed them how one could solve that example problem with a one-liner.

[@srijanraghavula]

The backdoor joke is the one that i most related to😂

[@Long-Otter]

Not sure if it's just me, but I keep hearing literal crickets? Great content though!

[@veeloth]

it's the video

[@XDarkGreyX]

One was in the barn he sits in that day

[@kurtnelle]

"The dev that's really fast and lacks wisdom"

[@jamesjenkins9480]

I had a coworker rewrite over the weekend then immediately go on vacation and then it all crashed and my boss came looking for me... I was like "idk I don't even have proper access to deal with this. He literally just changed it and didn't explain how to use it."

[@alexandrecolautoneto7374]

I got emotionally bruised by the 10x explanation.

[@lucastsen]

Taking a short and making a whole video, welcome to youtube prime!

[@SimGunther]

Ladies and gentleman, we have officially found IRL genius Tom!

[@computerfan1079]

😂

[@i_zoru]

"perfect, i was stresstesting it " diabolical

[@shacham6]

4:07 Not really, though. Not as a general rule. I have worked with a ton of developers who (maybe because they can't type) squeeze as much functionanity as they can into one liners, ignore easy wins with names, etc. and when pressed they answer "it works".

[@AGentooUser]

8x youtuber

[@Matthias-Bedard]

Worked with a dude like this once... I don't think he ever actually finished a single project... Got things to 60% pretty quick though

[@douglasg14b]

The highest cost of software is in the maintenance. We read code far more than we write code. Idk how you can think readability is second fiddle here. Readability promotes familiarity. No one dev is going to understand a codebase with 40k files, but if it's meticulously and diligently organized, with common problems made patternable, then it's readable and understandable.

[@sirhenrystalwart8303]

In past jobs, I worked with people who were definitely 10x engineers. They were insanely productive, and as one person provided more value than entire teams do at my current job. Their code wasn't the prettiest, but it got the job done. And they were the only person that needed to read it, so it was fine.

[@_nickthered]

Prime never actually met a 10x engineer

[@ivorybanana2183]

I can not relate to the part talking about rewrites. All the rewrites i've commited in the past year were absolutely necessary. What do you do when you get asked to implement a feature, but the code you have to work with lacks in layers and it is all a big mess with no tests and no clear dependencies? You can not even know for sure if you have not broken something while introducing new stuff because no tests exist. So you write tests, and for them to be written layers need to be defined. I am not the type of person to do extra work just because i do not like the naming or constructs used, but i am 100% willing to spend more time on a feature and a partial rewrite of an affected code section if it helps with testability

[@olavisau]

That's the thing with 10x engineers - they 10x the parts you don't want them to 10x too :D

[@BaldyMacbeard]

Rewriting the whole thing over the weekend. Isn't that basically every React project you've inherit *ever*? You can spend 10 days trying to understand how someone did it... or just rewrite the whole thing over the weekend.

[@Abraham_writes_random_code]

10x engineers can be terrifying, but this hahaha

[@lawrenceplays]

I love the creator of the original video, I've personally agreed with most of the videos they have put out from the LaTex and PHP videos to the Senior Postdoc Python video (that one I showed to a couple current PhDs and it gave them a good chuckle). Seriously underrated channel.

[@Marty234]

Readable is DEFINITELY a thing!! It is not cramming as much as possible on 1 line. Its putting comments and using white space & comments to group things in organized chunks. You shouldn't need to be familiar with the code to read it. HS students code only thinking about whether it works or not. Professionals think about error handling, logging & readability/maintainability in addition to the absolute bare minimum of making it work right in a happy path scenario (a HS students *only* concern)

[@burntt999]

Riding with my gf down the road on a sunny warm day with the window rolled down, Watching two of my fav KZbinrs in one place cracking up.. man.. life is nice right now. Little moments :)

[@anonymous49125]

10x doesn't mean more bugs. That's some weapons grade cope. The better you get at programming, you usually end up writing more maintainable code with less bugs... not the other way around....

[@seanohara5754]

What if the real 10x engineer is the friends we make along the way ❤

[@nosknut]

Bro months after companies started firing their 10x devs the internet started getting slower. At this point everything runs on "standardized" frameworks following "standardized" best practices that makes everything slow. Everything is running on a chromium that is being developed by people who have no fucking idea what optimization and longevity means. Even fucking windows 11 feels like it was written by the same people that are developing the fucking discord mobile app. Say what you want about 10x devs making bugs. It does not matter if your service is bug-free if it is utterly useless on most devices.

[@TalicZealot]

Shit.... I'm that rewrite guy.

[@m4rt_]

So you've worked with Richard Hendricks?

[@mjn6six6]

"It's my library" hahahaha

[@75hilmar]

That is one of his best, seriously

[@dreri3738]

What kind of JS framework is 10x?

[@fernandogurgel]

Million.js

[@jablanguado7738]

@@fernandogurgel No, that's 1,000,000x, not 10x.

[@anonymous49125]

SSH backdoor part reminded me of: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZete55tnpWBis0

[@gizmoitus]

This reminds me of the days when some companies measured "productivity" by tracking "K lines of code" aka KLOCS, which was the source of contention between Microsoft and IBM in the period they worked on OS/2. I remember watching "Triumph of the nerds" which covers the early days of PC computing, and laughing at Steve Ballmer talking about this. You know something is idiotic when Ballmer (who was a marketing guy and not a developer) is right about something like how not to try and measure the value of a developer or the quality and usefulness of the code they've written. Small clip here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oXmsaIWKgM2fsJI

[@garthenar]

Hey, how about we approach the refactor the same way we should have approached the code in the first place; WITH A DUCKING PLAN!!!

[@davea136]

"I rewrote all of the React interface code, movd to a different ORM, and updated to a new version of Kafka and changed all of the var names and labels on everything. We have a meeting in 15 minutes, so I need you to update your features to the new code and demo it at the meeting, ok?" Not hyperbole. And nothing he ever did followed any fndamental principle like SPOT or seperating what could be moved into a data file, or a properties file, everything was spaghetti code. I never shout. I had to shout at this idiot repeatedly. And the managers loved him because he'd splash up a web page with a half-baked React tree component that looked cool (but was unusable. Nodes would shift around with mouse movement, zooming in and out at random, that sort of thing.) but was never part of he app's workflow. But hey, it looks cool on a projector in a demo! Fire that person immediately if you possibly can.

[@douglasg14b]

Eh, 1k LOC change Monday at 11am seems reasonable. Theres a few team members who can reliably produce 1-2 300-600loc new feature PRs a day on good weeks. You learn to read code well, and how to write readable code as a team, when working with fast teams.

[@nymvno]

Prime watches 3 minute video: 26 minutes Prime watches a short: average length long form video

[@mr.k8660]

the guy looks like Magnus Carlsen

[@artr0x93]

you gotta watch the full video!

[@dan-garden]

I feel like I was attacked this whole video and I'm blaming the ADHD once again

[@nano_sweet]

10x more lines = 10x more bugs? I think it's more like 20x more bugs it's probably superlinear.

[@thefrub]

4:28 Imagine that you find out that one of your employees is asking twitch streamers for tech support 😂

[@johnkost2514]

Wait until you work with an 11x one. They drop acid and code and play guitar ..

[@lucasteo5015]

real 10x engineer turn short into long

[@wannabelikegzus]

4:00 - I legit had a manager once who got on to me for not writing comments the way he wanted.

[@iloveblender8999]

I mean the reason for private functions is to be able to change stuff without affecting other developers. Changing the public stuff without any warning is bad.

[@hagenzwosta]

Pull requests instead of letting everyone just push whatever they want. There, problem solved.

[@faithful451]

Really fast but lacking in wisdom. Yep major problem 100%.

[@zenlanfleek6580]

Prime, great video but you haven't reacted to the whole video. It's on his KZbin channel.

[@abhijivani3001]

6:57 epic line😂

[@mfc1190]

Your story in the middle with your boss handing you some code and then changing it out from under you is something I’ve dealt with like 3X in this year working at my new company. The issue is that he’s also an amazing engineer.

[@kettelbe]

More a communication or relationship issue? Pulling the rug from under you?

[@mfc1190]

@@kettelbe ultimately that’s what it boils down to. We work in a large org, but we’re releasing a product in September and so we’re essentially in startup mode. There are two main parts of our code base that leverage a lot of the same infra. I do lead new feature development in part 2. A lot of the changes he makes are to improve (or fix) real time analysis in part 1, but I’ve relied on behavior that just changes over a weekend (and sometimes in a big way). I’ve brought it up to him, and he apologizes but keeps doing it. Haha. It’s a tough environment.

[@aaronhauth8880]

thats my boss too 🥴

[@mfc1190]

@@hansu7474 you’re not wrong, and this is the reality in fast paced environments. And we are actually doing what you’ve suggested. I lead part 2, and distribute work / modules among 3 other members + myself. It works well. The challenge is that my boss is changing “core” or “common” library components that affect infra. And it’s not even his fault - they have to change, and he didn’t know they had to change until he got word. He also doesn’t always know that they’ll “break” our code. It sometimes manifests itself as subtle changes to data, but only in the middle of processing very large sets, so it’s not even picked up for smaller batch. It’s just challenging, but it sucks to deal with.

[@lowe7372]

What monitor is that?

[@chupitolepame5357]

I personally experienced the "Moving AWS stack to mac mini" guy.

[@deadvatniks]

imaging wanting giving your employer 10x what they pay you for. lol.

[@2an_sound]

your 10x chart is amazing

[@kopsha]

Did you just send all the 10x engineers to the recycling bin?

[@joeyjo-jojuniorshabadoo6827]

"Big reason of bugs is the lack of testing"

[@alexanderespejo695]

dude rlly turned a yt short into a full video

[@Dychord]

Bro reacted 20sec later for the microwave joke 💀

[@peterromfeld4091]

isnt a 10x enginerr a person who enables other people on the team to work fast and more efficient?

[@bwbbfcb]

Well how about that, team safety looks like the typescript logo.

[@techsuvara]

Digital Ocean... You know that's it BOOM! :) OCEAN SAILING!

[@NostraDavid2]

0.1x engineer.

[@moritzdietel1968]

I would love if you watch the whole video and not just the short

[@rafisofyan]

That refactor over the weekend just unearth some bad memories from the past

[@omni_0101]

I worked with a 10x engineer whose problem solving ability was insane and he could bang out godlike code. He couldn't stand how slow other people worked, was always pushing them (social skills were extremely deficient), and so he wrote a spy app to secretly watch people's computers without them knowing. That guy got fired because I reported his shiz to ITSec (I was his lead). The heartburn was real.

[@jalex19100]

I've worked with a lot of those personas. hah

[@nexovec]

tbh. if there's a time for a rewrite, it's probably the weekend, because noone else works. !!IF THERE'S A TIME!!

[@ErazerPT]

Back in my course, our last 4h was showing our final coursework, a betting site. Guess who was "reworking s**t" while others were presenting their work because... some stuff just wasn't "orthogonal" (don't ask). But it worked, to full spec, no bugs, no crashes, just worked. All but Facebook login, which i didn't understand why, as it worked ok at home. And the examiners just grinned instead of telling me FB was blackholed in the LAN. But... the only reason i did it was because i had the dubious honor of having had to do all the "group work" by myself as there was no one to pair me with (great planning). So i was the systems architect, systems engineer, front end dev, backend dev, DBA, DevOps, etc... changes were easy because i knew were all the pieces were. tldr: you can do "refactor over the weekend" nonchalantly if you're on your own. NOT if you're in a team OR you have people dependent on your work (library code).

[@LouisDuran]

The absolute worst was an engineer I worked with about 9 years ago. He would do complete refactors on Thursday until late at night. Check it in in an uncompilable state and say on Friday morning... "I'm leaving early can you (speaking to me and an intern that I worked with) get the code compiling? I got it most of the way working, you can see what it's supposed to do. Just get it to the state where it builds and runs." And then the guy would leave early with the project in a broken state. Oh and the same guy invited me to lunch once and while having lunch casually and with no apologies dropped into conversation that his grandfather was a founding member of the Texas chapter of the KKK. Ivan Jones.... what a fucking tool.

[@ajohnson9630]

I'm a software engineer and find this to be incredibly cringey. Not the original video being reacted to, but this reaction to it and kind of pandering to a certain crowd. However, I do agree wholeheartedly with the last part which is the "good" engineer that just makes more bugs and unsupportable code. I doubt it's intentionally for job security, but it definitely feels like it. I've always interpreted success as working myself out of a job.

[@hanswoast7]

Perfect ending xD

[@0xCAFEF00D]

1:00 Its also so hard to argue against sometimes. A very old codebase going back to the late 80s was introduced to a programmer like this in the late 2010s. And of course he wanted to replace everything. Started ripping things out piece by piece and rewriting it. And every argument is solid, it's non-standard now you no longer use initd, this code isn't portable, why is this pointer being used as a pointer, index into a list and to store an error return value that's never handled properly even if it's checked? But if you start poking that code or if you don't cover every case you're gonna break something. And then maybe some critical infrastructure breaks in three countries because you chose to use a "proper" library instead of what was there.

[@markselezenev6227]

People like this exist. 10k lines in 3 days full of new libraries/frameworks of refactored code that is responsible for money moving around and being used :@ They also get pissed off when you tell them to use older stuff or libraries or tech because they can't try new stuff.

[@hoyinleunghk]

This is so funny😂😂

[@brymstoner]

testing mentioned - triggered clip quit.

[@vulnerablegrowth3774]

People often shit on “10x engineer” because they are coping on their lack of skill so they swap in a normal engineer who is an self-important as if that’s what was meant by 10x when it really wasn’t. They just don’t want to have the conversation about how some people really are 10x (if not more) better than others. Hard to face that reality.

[@MrAbrazildo]

7:25, I once made a nasty bug by refactoring 4 lines / 2 cmds to 1 line / 1 cmd. They were all made by ternary operators, nested or not. I mentally checked "every" possible case. It ended up being correct in 6 of 8 cases, as long as I remember. It was hard to catch, because 1) it was hard to made it appear (seldom seeing, but never gone), 2) it appeared after tons of things happened _(reproducing its scenario could produce a false positive, regarding to its source)_ , 3) and I had a false lead/clue, which took a time to realize that. Hard to test, happen and promising false clues. Automated tests would catch that right at its birth. But there's a question that doesn't want to silence: if automated tests are necessary for every bit of refactoring, would them in the end taking more time than catching a bug when it finally happen?

> There is nothing more painful then the dev that's really fast and lacks in wisdom. I have been that dev. I have experienced that dev. I think we should all have this quote framed on our walls.

[@astrahcat1212]

Real programmers use C++, but that's not hip enough to make the big bucks and these days they want 5+ years experience at least.

[@Veptis]

I review comment a bug in my own PR instead of pushing a fix, since I havent come up with a fix for 4 days and not looking at the code. I was just hoping it would magically show up in my brain.... But hasnt yet.

[@mfc1190]

“Rewrites over the weekend” - my director. Merge to staging, I rebase, and things behave differently. Bummer.