“Clearly there are 100x or 1,000x engineers now. The world hasn’t adjusted.”
— Guillermo Rauch (Vercel)
Guillermo: I’ve been really pilled with this idea of software factories. You used to ship the output directly, and everything inside the company was how good is person A at shipping output B? And now what’s happening is the way that I’m judging you as an engineer is, are you producing the factory that will produce multiplicative outputs B through Z, right?
We used to believe, and it used to be somewhat controversial, that there’s 10X engineers. Now clearly there’s 100X or 1,000X engineers. And the world hasn’t fully adjusted to this.
@naval: I used to get flamed on Twitter for saying there are 10X engineers, because it flies in the face of so much equality philosophy that everyone’s equal. But the reality is, when you’re operating in idea domains—when you’re operating in intellectual domains and virtual digital domains—it’s not even 10X. It’s 100X or 1,000X, and it always has been.
Satoshi, Notch, the guy who invented JavaScript, the Brendan Eichs of the world. John Carmack. These are 1,000X programmers.
Not to even mention if you choose the right thing to work on versus the wrong thing to work on, that’s an infinity difference. And it could just be not necessarily even a better programmer, just one who had a better judgment of what to work on in the first place.
And now obviously it’s less controversial, because of AI leverage.
