The Rise of the 1/10th X Engineer
For many years Executive people in software-driven businesses have expressed their dissatisfaction with the cost structure and performance of their development processes by speaking of their desire to hire 10X Engineers.
10X Engineers possess many positive traits in the minds of Executive people and the Talent Acquisition teams who work for them: capable of leaping over tall backlogs in a single bound, they possess the ability to produce and ship working, tested, bug-free software at an astounding rate. Their mere existence is proof of the inadequacies of every single 'typical' or '1X' engineer ever validated by their obviously seriously flawed existing hiring process.
The biggest problem Executive people have with 10x Engineers, or the people who call themselves that, is their obvious scarcity. There are simply not enough of them to go around, and so most businesses must instead be built upon the efforts of people whose most obvious quality, to them, is their ability to accomplish objectives in a way that can only be complained about.
Astounding then to discover a recent trend toward hiring from the absolute opposite end of the capability spectrum: the 1/10th X Engineer. The 'TenthX" Engineer does not understand the business or the code base that supports it, duplicates files and writes poorly conceived functions with reckless abandon, baldly lies about completing test debugging while marking them skipped behind the scenes, and generally leaves a trail of disruption in every code base they touch.
The ONLY way to make these TenthX Engineers productive is to pair them with other more experienced and capable Engineers who then provide detailed and specific instruction at every step, and walk back their most egregious errors so they can attempt the task a second, third, or fourth time until they get it sort of right. Those would be the same Engineers whose non-TenX-iness was previously a fatal flaw.
TenthX Engineers are everything a 10X Engineer is said not to be, and Executive people cannot get enough of them. So what is going on?
Well, it should be obvious by now that the TenthX Engineer is not a human actor, but rather an Agentic AI software developer. For all the drawbacks - Executive people do WISH that Agentic AI developers would be much more like a 10X Engineer than they are - the relatively low cost and sense of absolute control of the thing is so compelling to business they are willing to drive teams to overcome, immediately if not sooner, every apparent flaw these new developers exhibit.
It turns out that if you simply pair a (perceived by Executive people to be fatally deficient but necessary) typical Engineer with a TenthX engineer, who types really fast and can do a lot of the close-to-mindless grunt work required in coding, under close, skeptical, and constant scrutiny, you can achieve a performance gain that makes those (perceived by Executive people to be fatally deficient but necessary) typical Engineers look a lot more (in the eyes of those Executive people) like the 10X Engineers they have long been criticized for not being.
Every offshore team provider in the world knows that no amount of discounting or lowball quoting would be enough to offset the lack of quality performance Agentic AI developers exhibit. You could not propose an offshore team arrangement where you assign a quickly but kind of randomly typing Engineer of any quality to be a pair programmer with an Engineer of a Fortune 50 client and expect any sort of response other than laughter, but what is intolerable in humans is apparently just an acceptable process challenge when dealing with machines who do not need benefits, holidays, sick leave, training budgets, comms plans to keep them up to date, or quarterly meetings to ensure they are all on the same page about the roadmap of the business.
In the same way that mythical 10X Engineers have been said to be able to JUST DELIVER, without needing handholding of any kind - a sort of absence of bothersome human needs - the TenthX developer displays a real absence of actual human needs, as it is in fact literally not human.
No amount of handholding is apparently too much if it enables this new class of worker, for the simple reason that every business can have as many as they want, and the early data suggests that pairing up human and non-human actors in this way can result in productivity levels not achievable by typical Engineers who lack TenX-iness when they are not paired up with an Agentic performance-enhancing prosthesis.
The point here is simply to remind that the actual people in the equation - often maligned and under-appreciated - are the real key to Agentic AI development success. There is an abundance of evidence showing the Agentic AI developers available today are not capable of working independently on a code base, as a human developer might be, without a near certainty of very negative undesired and unintended results. Yet somehow, when paired with human Engineers, the presence of these less-than-capable non-human actors results in a much greater than 1 + 1 = 2 outcome.
So if the math is 1X (typical) Engineer + 1/10thX Engineer = (some number much greater than 1.1X productivity), we need to recognize the contribution made by all the variables in the equation. Only then can we systematically optimize for that outcome in a sustainable and predictable way.
We seem now in many cases to be focussing solely on the machines, and to continuing to denigrate the people who are part of the human-Agentic developer cyborg pair, when they are valuable and key resources enabling all of the benefits we are now beginning to discover.
If you have a story about how people are being undervalued in the rush to implement Agentic AI Software developers, put it in the comments. Lets learn together how to implement this new capability in a way that celebrates the contributions of the humans, and not just the machines, at the forefront of this new way of working.
About Me
I'm an experienced business architect with experience in both startup and mature organizations. I take a data-driven approach to the design, implementation, and optimization of the people, processes, and tools - including Agentic AI development tools - required for your organization to accelerate into the future. If that seems helpful to you, please reach out. I'd love to learn more about you and how I can help with the challenges you face.