this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I'll speak from my experience in engineering.
It is extremely difficult to find experts. There are just not that many people around who are both smart and knowledgeable enough to solve high end engineering problems. This is why the vast majority of complex problems are solved by very few people, with the rest existing to support them.
10x'ers are real. Except it's worse than that. The tip top can solve problems the median person will never be able to.
Second, like everything, expertise exists on a continuum. Since the best of the best are radically more talented than the median (who you could still even call experts) or even the 90th percentile, you want the top ones.
It's just very hard to tell them apart in an interview. You can try the standard interview questions, but that's not very discriminatory.
Standard interview questions are terrible for that. It's probably better to test how well they learn and how good their thinking is in certain areas.
I'd rather hire someone who hasn't a clue but can come up to speed than someone with decades of experience that still hasn't managed to learn much.
What on earth is your experience in engineering that you would have anything to do with 10x'ers, as you called them?
Also, I'm willing to bet the median expert will suffice for most problems.
Hah!
No. The median engineer cannot, say, design anything to do with a tokamak fusion reactor. Even the ones that work at places that build tokamaks. At least the hard stuff, that's why they're in supporting roles.
The people that do those types of things are very, very special.
As for 10x'ers. This is a standard term. It's used everywhere.
Easy proof that they exist is that lots of people are taking on multiple "full time" jobs. Like 4-5.
Those are at least 4x'ers. They're just pretending to be 1x'ers for the salary bump.
And of course, 10 x'ers don't get 10 times the salary. Double would be pushing it.
This is 100% true.
I work as an electrical and hydraulic engineer and i consider myself above average.
The people with the knowledge base above me are ridiculously intelligent and in a different playing field.
I love calling NFPA and giving them a code reference and they know it off the top of their head.
But, of all engineering problems, how many of them are associated with a tokamak fusion reactor?
I'm not saying these people don't exist or that they're not highly valuable. I'm just saying their skills don't need to be applied everywhere all the time, which leaves room for "regular" experts.
I'm deliberately avoiding identifying my industry, but this exists in every industry.
I can be flippant and say "we're not making a web shopping cart here" to my people, but the top engineers making Amazon's shopping cart must deal with a lot of complicated problems.
Do I even need to list things? Think of something that's difficult. Nuclear bombs, medical devices, jet engines, skyscrapers, semiconductors, guided missiles. I could go on and on, but I'd still have to explain to you about the more mundane things like operations research.
In case it helps to illustrate the point, those aren't the most complicated things; those are areas in which a few very complicated, difficult problems exist. For example, semiconductors is a very massive field.
Designing the next utilitarian op amp is not something everyone can do but it's not that difficult of a problem, necessarily.
Designing the next cutting edge CPU (for Intel or AMD or Apple or whatever) on the other hand is (I imagine) a handful of very difficult problems (most of which I have only the vaguest idea of) like optimizing pipeline and predictive execution or how to get to the next level chip design & fabrication process (which itself has a bunch of different issues, from what I gather).
That's where I would expect the 10x or whatever to work. At the cutting edge of engineering and science where the hardest problems are.
Plenty of room for regular experts.
Iβm sorry you havenβt met one (or recognised it when you did). They exist
My experience is between a typical engineer and a 10x'er is that a typical engineer can be trusted to do repeatable work, but they have major issues handling anything that isn't exactly what they are used to.
The problem a lot of times is that a lot of issues that require an engineer are usually the more novel problems. You also have automation solving the routine. So you have a lower demand for routine practitioners while still maintaining demand for higher level work.