> When I said infinite is impossible, I meant in absolute terms, not relative to somebody else.
The whole thread is about relative terms, including when I said infinite-x. And the context is clearly about certain worthwhile problems, nobody talks about a 10x engineer as someone able to make a trivial phone apps or web pages 10x faster than than average.
> The whole thread is about relative terms, including when I said infinite-x.
Relative means numerator/denominator. My first reply was simply breaking that down into parts, aruing that the numerator could not be infinite, and that the denominator being zero is not a very interesting case.
> nobody talks about a 10x engineer as someone able to make a trivial phone apps or web pages 10x faster than than average.
Actually, that's precisely what I think a lot of people who hear the term interpret it as. Especially from those who reject that the 10x engineer exists.
And there are quite a lot of engineers out there that believe that all any software engineer is doing, is to follow detailed instructions/specifications for some product, whether that is to make trivial web page or improve how gcc optimized code on a new cpu architecture.
While in fact, the most productive engineers out there do NOT follow such specifications from others, but rather develop something revolutionary based on their own ideas. You're not likely to find 10000-x or better software developers that don't do it like that (I would argue that people like Linus Torvalds or Elon Musk would rate at around the million-x level, but not infinite-x )
I didn't say the numerator could be infinite, because again, the whole thread was talking about the relative change. Pretty obvious from the name, 10x Pretty big hint there, it's clearly a ratio.
And what I was talking about are very complex or new problems, and here are absolutely infinite-x people. Things where the average engineer will create exactly zero value on over time. I don't know about Musk, but Linus is of course one of them. Task someone to write a scalable distributed version control system before 2005, and the average engineer will be incapable of doing that.
If you wanted to talk about something else entirely like working on simpler things, fine.
The whole thread is about relative terms, including when I said infinite-x. And the context is clearly about certain worthwhile problems, nobody talks about a 10x engineer as someone able to make a trivial phone apps or web pages 10x faster than than average.