Does every engineer need to be 10x Engineer in future

Have you ever felt in a growing organization, why we can’t just have a bunch for product creators (individual contributors) and people who can sell products to solve customer’s critical problems with minimum overhead? I felt this a few years ago when I was volunteered to take on a wider role. I was really enjoying myself with a bunch of really creative folks and as we introduced new technology the R&D team grew from 8 people to 30 people (also some more products/people moved into the team). I was the only overhead for this group. We worked to automate as much as possible the daily “management stuff” like weekly reporting, quality metrics and root cause analysis.

As with any change in life, I was asked a question how things can be done better in the wider group by my boss (Lesson learnt: There is no “what if” discussion that does not lead to change.). Long story short, I ended up with double the number of folks and a mission that if we wanted to pull it off, we would need to double the team in 2-3 years. Well, that is when the adult conversation of having an R&D management hierarchy came in (read: End of the days when I and few of the leads would constantly try to out automate our leadership roles to enjoy solving new hard customer issues – technical and non-technical). Over the next year as we went through transition tons of lessons were learned – some I would love to chat over a good Scotch and some I rather not talk about. During this process, I kept on asking myself why we can’t avoid such transitions.

The other thing about life is that if you look hard most of the time someone else has done what you are trying to do or they failed trying it. So I started searching for it. Finally last year I met Scott Berkun at Construx Software Executive Summit in Seattle and he gave me a signed copy of his book on the corporation Automattic (the company behind Wordpress.com) who have tried to avoid this transition to many layers of management hierarchy creating a 1B+ USD valued company. The book is called “The year without pants” (And yes it has a very interesting book cover). After reading it this year during my trip to Sales Kick Off, I finally got the courage to put in writing some of my thoughts.

For folks who want to avoid reading the rest of the blog – the answer to “Does every engineer need to be 10x Engineer in future” is “yes”. For those who I will offend with my opinion, I apologize in advance as my experience is limited to half a dozen SW and SW/HW organizations and a very unsuccessful attempt with 4 others dreamers in 2000 to change the world (i.e. tried a startup – It was not a “.com” though we were tempted to put it in to raise a boatload of VC money)

Why do we have SW company?

When I was in 8th-grade coding in BASIC and Pascal trying to make BBC Micro crash and ZX Spectrum put abusing messages like “Your BASIC is Bad”, I used to think software company was a cool place where folks, who loved hacking or coding, got together and tried to outdo each other. In the end, they put some stuff out there and everyone would fall over each other to buy it.

By the time I was through 2 jobs, it became clear that a software company is a place where you find a problem customer really cares about, find a solution, find a way to define value to the customer, get paid and support it throughout the lifecycle of the SW license and/or contracts

A software corporation typically has following roles – sale (revenue generation), customer support (revenue continuation), marketing (value monetization), Deployment/fulfilment (value delivery), support organization (IT, financial, legal, HR…) (value preservation) and product development/R&D (value generation).

What is 10x Engineer?

A 10x engineer (this can be sales engineer, PM etc.) is a person whose value added is equivalent to 10 other engineers or managers. For 1 10x engineer typically there is 4-5 other developer, maybe 2-3 Product manager and product engineer, at least 1 QA engineer, N number of support engineers, N number of customer support and success engineer, legal, HR,.. etc. By the way, the 10x engineer does not need to be a developer. The value of this type of 10x engineer depends on the technology adoption cycle. I have tried to mark the technology adoption curve with where 10X engineer adds the most value. It does not mean a good engineer will not be valuable all through technology adoption curve but his value will not be that of a 10x engineer.

Source: smartideastor.com

The question is why we do not move out highly valuable engineers as technology moves through the adoption cycle. From little insight I have, it is because the process and platforms we develop in early technology adoption have a large dependence on 10x R&D individual. The cost of migration of technology to a platform that enables the right type of 10x engineer is work that does not have good value articulation and is hence avoided.

How is the democratization of automation helps in migration from a 10x engineer to other?

The answer to what will help in moving technology to right 10x engineers is a combination of platforms and automation. One of the side-effects of a platform is that it forces people to work in clear, specific and well-defined framework. For example, if we look at Saleforce.com platform for salespeople. If a sales engineers who are 10x engineer has been doing an amazing job and now his value is not that high as technology gets into the laggard domain, he will have a clear way to hand-off the information to others( this can be another sales engineer or OEM or in future even an automated sales entity). Now coming back to the domain I am more comfortable – R&D and PM. Here are my observations –

• Utility computing is and will be a key platform for letting 10x R&D engineers do their job without constraints of CapEx budgeting. A typical 10x R&D engineer wants to rapidly test and discard ideas. To do such experiments for software design exploration, one needs a scalable elastic resource allocation environment. To plan for extreme hypothesis exploration, the kind of HW one has to plan for in CapEx is not realistic. Utility computing provides that and makes it an open problem and much more helpful.
• Use of open source platforms like Apache Hadoop (large data distributed computing), Apache Spark/Pregal (high scalability computing) etc. helps 10x engineers (R&D and PM) to concentrate value creation in the area that has the highest return without spending time and effort on areas that are important but not high-value addition. Also, these platforms provide higher quality as the platform testing cost is spread over all applications developed on that platform. The bottom-line – collective wisdom of many who toil out of passion rather than for a paycheck will outpace that of the few, hence open-source platforms are always going to be superior to the closed platform.
• Unified project management, content management and communication platform with good analytics like Jira will be key for connecting 10x engineers and also to have orderly transitions. This provides context-based transparency to the evolution of project decisions and traceability to the software/content. This is generally called tribal knowledge and its transfer is key for project transition to right 10x engineer as technology goes through evolution cycle.
• One of the core value a corporation provides is support as explained to me by a well-respected technologist/colleague. With the open source platform, there can be 10x support engineers who can support customers as an individual entity. Sometimes corporations can resell support too – think Redhat for Linux (which is an open source OS) or Hortonworks for Spark.
• As platform-as-service is taking off (AWS is already evolving from Infrastructure as service to platform as service), it will further reduce the need for 3rd party support resellers.
• With sales platforms like AWS Marketplace, Apple App Store etc. the sales, fulfilment and legal support will evolve rapidly. Will it force complete consolidation of these activities is still an open question? The core challenge in these platforms will lie around product marketing and management as one of my 10x team members explained to me 2 years after starting a freemium game company on such a platform.

Finally to answer the core question of what will mere mortals like me do when only 10x engineers will have good jobs using platforms and automation for things that are not their core skills? We the mere mortals will need to find a place in the ecosystem where our skill can be of 10x value. If not, we will end up as a cog in the “Gig” economy till automation removes the need for that manual cog (like the drivers on Uber when autonomous driving comes along).

Disclaimer: The opinions articulated are that of Pradiptya Ghosh and not of any organization he is or has been associated with.