A 10x engineer does not stay in the same role/level as a company grows. They’re very important though. And it’s a good reminder that roles/levels don’t necessarily matter compared to the relevant work.
All FAANG and other smart companies hire at better than 50% at the role/level in order to constantly evolve.
No they don't. They _say_ they do (really mainly Amazon) and the rumor develops legs and gets repeated.
To actually do this, you need an objective measure that is repeatable over many different kinds of products, domains and people and they is a very hard problem no one has cracked. Career ladders and some calibrations help to do this but it'd never perfect and people slip through the cracks.
If you're at a big company, you've seen people get a rating that seemed misaligned to their work because an arbitrary curve is enforced or a project has high visibility by sheet luck because an exec was adamant that the project be on the roadmap.
> All FAANG and other smart companies hire at better than 50% at the role/level in order to constantly evolve.
Do you mean that they keep hiring people better than 50% of the current people in that role/level?
That's not my impression from Big Tech. All the chatter I hear is that, until very recently, they kept hiring more and more people, and over time have been getting lower capability, and more towards worker grunt drones.
(Though I've often heard that the better people already at the company couldn't pass or do as well at the Leetcode-like interview metrics performance as the current candidates often do, because they have huge masses of people training for the metrics specifically.)
In fact, when companies are incredibly successful based on early 10x employees, you're almost guaranteed to see the hiring bar go down over time.