The Mythical 10x Full-Stack Engineers ...

Often hear that we need to hire the "10x High Performing Full-Stack Engineers" to stay ahead of the curve and outperform the competition.

First things first - who is a '10x Full-Stack Engineer' ??? These are the very rare breed of rock-star software engineers that are 10 times more productive than the average software engineers and can single-handedly deal with any technology aspect from the front to the back.

How many of these '10x engineers' are really out there ??? For a rough estimation, let us make the following simplistic assumptions:

1. Use a simple normal distribution model from statistics
2. One or two standard deviations from the average include both the above-average and below-average engineers (two tails of the normal curve)
3. Let two standard deviations (from the average) imply the '10x engineers'

In 2021, there were roughly 8 billion people in the world, of which, approximately 27 million were software engineers ... To put it in perspective - this is about 0.3% of the world population ...

We know from statistics, that the average population clusters around the center to form about 70% of the group. Also, about 25% of the population are one standard deviation apart. This implies that about 12.5% would be above average. Finally, about 5% of the population are two standard deviations apart. From this, we can conclude about 2.5% of the population are the high-performing '10x engineers'. This means, of the 27 million engineers, only 675000 are the '10x software engineers' ... Do realize, every firm in every country is vying for this top talent ...

Now, let us zoom in further to the USA region ... USA had roughly about 4 million software engineers of the 27 million software engineers in the world. Doing some simple math, this implies that only about 100000 are the '10x software engineers' ... And how many tech firms do we have in the USA ??? For this, let us stick with the publicly traded firms only (forget about the privately held firms/startups). This is approximately about 5000 firms in the USA. Once again doing some simple math, each firm can get about 20 of the '10x software engineers' (in an idealistic world) ...

We don't live in an idealistic world and due to various factors some of the top tech firms typically attract more share of the top 10x engineering talent ... Remember we started with a very simplistic statistical model. The 100000 '10x software engineer' number is optimistic at best ... Also note we did not included the private/startups into this mix ...

Next, it takes few years of focused effort by any engineer to be proficient in every aspect of the tech stack from the front to the back ... There is a golden rule that states "it takes about 10 years of dedicated practice for one to master an area" ... Add to that, the fact that the technology space is very fluid as new technologies keep coming in ...?

So, why are organizations in this futile chase, looking for these elusive mythical '10x full-stack engineers' ???

For me, this feels like looking for an artist who can draw, paint, sing, dance, and play all the musical instruments used in a band ... GOOD LUCK finding such a talent ... Don't get me wrong - am sure there will be such a talent in some part of the world somewhere ... the next Leonardo da Vinci ...

Rather, why not create an environment that enables and fosters learning and growth for the average engineers, that is void of any bureaucracy, so they can perform at 1.25x or 1.5x or even 2x and go from there ... In any organization, we WILL find many average engineers who have the right attitude, intent, and the willingness to help and contribute ... it is just that they have not been shown the path to the next level of awesomeness ...