The Twitter world was at peace. Software engineers were happily deploying code to production on a Friday and sharing their weekend plans. That all changed with this tweet where Shekhar listed the following traits that a rare breed of “10x engineers” posess:
- They hate meetings.
- They are irregular about their times in the office.
- Their wallpapers are black.
- They know every single line of deployed code.
- They are full stack engineers, but rarely do UI.
- They can complete features in a few caffeinated hours.
- They rarely refer to documentation.
- They are always learning new frameworks.
- They are poor mentors and interviewers.
- They don’t write hacks, they have an exact mental model of the code.
He said that these are the types of engineers that founders should be hiring because they will take your startup to success.
He is 10x wrong.
Engineers are people, and in any company engineers will have to deal with other people. Engineers that don’t respect other people’s time, that do not care to share their knowledge with others, that don’t care for hiring new engineers and helping them grow, and that just overall have terrible communication skills are not the people that you want working with you or even for you.
If you’ve been following my content for a while, then you know that I care about:
- Being able to communicate effectively with other people (including non-engineers).
- Learning the fundamentals, not just the hottest frameworks on the market.
- Writing non-clever code and making it simple for anyone to understand.
- Never belittling other programming languages or forms of development.
- Realizing that no one really knows anything (myself included).
At the end of the day, it’s really not about the code. If you are an extremely good engineer but a terrible person, I would not want to work with you, and additionally I would definitely value someone’s soft skills (e.g. communication) and willingness to learn above all else.
📚 Related Resources
Some valuable resources in relation to this week’s topic.
- 🎙 Why communication is an important skill
- 🎙 Continuous learning
- 📺 KITZE - JUNIOR FOR LIFE (10X ENGINEERS DISS TRACK 2019 4K LMAO)
- 📝 Traditional vs modern web development
- 📝 Should you be perfect?
- 📝 The Most Important Non-Programming Skills for Programmers
🗂 Tab Dump
Just freeing up some of my open browser tabs…
- 🎙 Side Project Balancing Act - Some useful strategies for giving your side projects the attention they deserve.
- 📝 My Blogging Editing Process - Article by Lindsey Kopacz sharing her blogging setup and workflow.
- 📺 Turning Side Projects into Profitable Startups - A valuable talk for indie makers by Pieter Levels.
- 📺 GraphQL: The Documentary (Official Release) - Explores the story of why and how GraphQL came to be.
- 📰 Netlify Analytics - Accurate insights without performance impacts.
- 📰 Next.js 9 - This version of Next.js adds Typescript support, dynamic routing, API routes, and much more.
- 📦 React-pdf - React renderer for creating PDF files on the browser, mobile and server.
📅 Updates
- Shared my thoughts regarding web components and avoiding trendy tech in this week’s #DevDiscuss chat on Twitter.
- Other life events got in the way this week, but it was a good break away from the hectic schedule of content creation. I hopefully made up for it with the number of resources provided in this issue of the newsletter!
- One more week before I head off to Tanzania, Africa for 2 weeks! I will be meeting some relatives and doing some exploring which you will be able to follow along with mostly on my Instagram. I will hopefully schedule some content in case I won’t be able to create anything new during that time.
See you next Sunday, same inbox? 👋