10X Developers Never Get Promoted 😢

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[MarkTrudgeonRulez]

I'm a developer for 30+ years and my first love is coding. The last thing I want to do is get promoted into people management. As long as your pay is kept inline as if promoted then I don't see the problem. If the company doesn't want to compensate you then walk. I have my own company and contract to companies. The money issue goes away, charge the going rate and you will find you earn more and have the freedom to move and not feel you owe the company loyalty!

[CaribouDataScience]

The old cliche is, "if you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted...."

[Leonhart_]

I don't want a promotion to manager, I want proportional compensation to my skills.

[UltraFlynn]

Outstanding observations!

As someone who spent 25 years as a developer, moved into management for 6 years and then moved back to being a developer again I can vouch for the accuracy.

[Lukas-qyon]

i've heard this point before, i saw a post or smth with the point that "If you do three peoples job, they're gonna have to hire 3 people to promote you", and it's true. although you want to do your best work for your company since you feel it's the honest road. you end up locking yourself in a position, everyone should need to learn to reject work beyond your responsibility, because it can be the reason you don't get promoted.

[deed_it]

That's why 10x developers would actively find another company that would pay them higher. And if there current company values them, then they would counter -offeeeer that.

[fabricehategekimana]

That's so true. The 10x developpers can't be promoted in a managerial role because there will be a large loss in productivity and a 10x dev like doing dev things. It's more usual to change work place where the paid is higher in this case and if the company want to keep you they need to increase that salary. But a management role can be a real good experience with opportunities to learn more

[obiwankenobe]

Maybe it's a bit specific to where I live (Poland, here the devs have the good life. We don't send out 100 CVs to get a job at a company, it's the companies that send out their headhunters with 10 offers to us before we kindly accept one). I heard of a story of this one guy at a company I worked at, an extreme genius who solved all the problems, a critical employee. So critical, that when managers and directors were meeting, they would insist, and humbly wait for him to show up to them late. So critical, that when his manager got in a feud with him and wanted to fire him, their manager fired his manager instead to keep him around.
When you're this good, why would you ever want to become a manager? Life as a 10x dev is much sweeter, and so is the paycheck (over here it's common for devs to make more bucks than their managers. Only mediocre devs are interested in becoming managers over here).

[alejandrogalea]

You are absolutely right in every word you said. Extroverts and social people got promoted, not the best experts

[mateusfernando]

I have been a software developer for almost 10 years, and considering all the companies I have worked for and my experiences, I can't find arguments to disagree with you. As always, great video!

[quaversal]

These videos are so useful, especially for a HS student as myself interested in becoming a developer in the near future. Thanks to you Marko, I've been able to see both sides of the coin & I'm even more passionate about proceeding into the field. I know it may not mean much but you're truly my role model so please never stop uploading!

This happens when every good developer wants to be an irreplaceable unicorn for its project. I personally do not held any domain or role specific knowledge only for myself, I document every single piece of knowledge which will be needed by anybody coming into my role after me. This helped me a lot in moving up in my 10+ years in IT, from devops engineer, through junior/medior/senior web developer and now lead engineer for a completely new project which is one of the key parts of IT for my employer.

[JReuben]

Striving to be 10x can be a good 30+ year personal goal - you are not your job, but you are your career.
15 year middle managers are always the first to get canned.
There are technical career paths too: Software Architect, Principle Engineer, Tech Lead - in flattened hierarchies, this is marketted as "influencing without authority".

[praveenvenkateswaran]

This is way too relatable...how do you deal with the annoyance at seeing this happen?

[jasonchen-alienroid]

I was a 10x engineer and before joining the company, I was a consultant as system architect. I can proudly say smartphone is architected today because of my direct contribution in system architecture and power management. During a performance review, the sr. director said they would just hire 20-50x people to replace me regardless of my impact. I left the team and joined corporate strategy. Fast forward 5 years, 80% of that department were laid-off due to strategy. The work and automation were implemented in the architecture and process, that after 3-5 iterations, additional investment would become diminishing returns. I didn't work for money (since I came from poverty). I just wanted to contribute to technology advancement and society. But I get those people who were impacted might never come back to engineering.

[kkollsga]

The last thing a company should do is promote their best engineers into leadership. They lose a great engineer they cant replace and gain bad leader without vision that are a dime a dousin. Great engineers that are good leaders and visionaries are not at your company. They generally run their own companies. If their best engineers start leaving they should increase their salaries, not their roles. Thats what good engineers want anyway.

[TimoWei]

That's my current problem. I'm shifting my career goals away from the fancy senior title towards a group or project lead position. Having worked with so many super smart engineers who are stuck (and often happy) in their current position, I'm a bit afraid to kinda dig my own grave with better programming skills and knowledge.

[rudidup]

A lot of this advice also carries over to other fields. Nice video!

[staaar]

I've met few 10x developers and I can see some pattern, but I think it's not that black and white. Between those few I know one, who wanted to be and didn't get promoted, started to hopping companies and in pretty short timespan landed position as CTO. So being promoted with that kind of quality at the same company seems nearly impossible, I think it's possible to reach management position elsewhere.

I wonder, if 10x is coding, 1x is in management, on what position would 0x developer end up? 🤔

[Dreacor]

This is actually pretty refreshing to hear and can be applied to many fields of work, not just developers. Keep up the good work!

A little side note. I was actually checking out that keyboard link you have in description. It seems that it's almost the same as you do, but the Enter key is different. You have the "regular, large one" (which I like way more) but the one in the link has the smaller one. Just making sure if it's actually the same keyboard or some new version of it?