How to Become a -10x Engineer

The original post is here, and the translation follows below.

How to Become a -10x Engineer (taylor.town)

The tech industry has a consensus: find 10x engineers (engineers who are 10 times more efficient).

Engineers like that are hard to find—you may never meet one in real life. Instead, you're more likely to run into a -10x (negative 10x efficiency) engineer.

A so-called -10x engineer doesn't save the team time; on the contrary, he wastes 400 hours of the team's work every week.

A -10x engineer has the following traits.

1.

He generates a lot of pointless work. Most commonly, he pushes to establish meaningless processes and keeps everyone busy with slides, charts, reports, ticket management, and so on.

2. He encourages the team to pursue elegance over pragmatism.
3. He makes it impossible for the team to make a final decision on anything.
4. He writes lengthy messages/files and shares them as widely as possible, so that everyone can weigh in and join the discussion.
5. He writes slow programs, for example avoiding database indexes, running single-threaded programs on a 16-core machine, and not compressing files.
6. He writes scripts that only he can understand, with no documentation.
7. He writes slow builds and slow tests.
8. He writes meaningless test cases.
9. He adds dependencies that require a lot of time to maintain, forcing engineers to learn each library individually.
10. He traps 10 engineers in a difficult project, attracting and wasting their talent.
11. He gets management to underestimate the difficulty of a project and overstate its usefulness, until it is delivered late or never completed at all.
12. He hires other engineers who are completely unproductive.