10X Studs and Fighters

Tech twitter, for the last week, has been inundated with unending debate on this tweetstorm by a VC about “10X engineers”. The tweetstorm was engineered by Shekhar Kirani, a Partner at Accel Partners.

I have friends and twitter-followees on both sides of the debate. There isn’t much to describe more about the “paksh” side of the debate. Read Shekhar’s tweetstorm I’ve put above, and you’ll know all there is to this side.

The vipaksh side argues that this normalises “toxicity” and “bad behaviour” among engineers (about “10X engineers”‘s hatred for meetings, and their not adhering to processes etc.). Someone I follow went to the extent to say that this kind of behaviour among engineers is a sign of privilege and lack of empathy.

This is just the gist of the argument. You can just do a search of “10X engineer”, ignore the jokes (most of them are pretty bad) and read people’s actual arguments for and against “10X engineers”.

Regular readers of this blog might be familiar with the “studs and fighters” framework, which I used so often in the 2007-9 period that several people threatened to stop reading me unless I stopped using the framework. I put it on a temporary hiatus and then revived it a couple of years back because I decided it’s too useful a framework to ignore.

One of the fundamental features of the studs and fighters framework is that studs and fighters respectively think that everyone else is like themselves. And this can create problems at the organisational level. I’d spoken about this in the introductory post on the framework.

To me this debate about 10X engineers and whether they are good or bad reminds me of the conflict between studs and fighters. Studs want to work their way. They are really good at what they’re competent at, and absolutely suck at pretty much everything else. So they try to avoid things they’re bad at, can sometimes be individualistic and prefer to work alone, and hope that how good they are at the things they’re good at will compensate for all that they suck elsewhere.

Fighters, on the other hand, are process driven, methodical, patient and sticklers for rules. They believe that output is proportional to input, and that it is impossible for anyone to have a 10X impact, even 1/10th of the time (:P). They believe that everyone needs to “come together as a group and go through a process”.

I can go on but won’t.

So should your organisation employ 10X engineers or not? Do you tolerate the odd “10X engineer” who may not follow company policy and all that in return for their superior contributions? There is no easy answer to this but overall I think companies together will follow a “mixed strategy”.

Some companies will be encouraging of 10X behaviour, and you will see 10X people gravitating towards such companies. Others will dissuade such behaviour and the 10X people there, not seeing any upside, will leave to join the 10X companies (again I’ve written about how you can have “stud organisations” and “fighter organisations”.

Note that it’s difficult to run an organisation with solely 10X people (they’re bad at managing stuff), so organisations that engage 10X people will also employ “fighters” who are cognisant that 10X people exist and know how they should be managed. In fact, being a fighter while recognising and being able to manage 10X behaviour is, I think, an important skill.

As for myself, I don’t like one part of Shekhar Kirani’s definition – that he restricts it to “engineers”. I think the sort of behaviour he describes is present in other fields and skills as well. Some people see the point in that. Others don’t.

Life is a mixed strategy.

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