3 Steps to Become The 10% Engineer

Work only 4 hours/week and have fulfilling life beyond your primary job

The term 10% engineer is a word-play on 10x engineer and 4-hour-work week by Tim Ferris (4-hour workweek = 10% of society’s normal 9-to-5 40-hour workweek). In fact, a lot of the learning to become a 10% engineer was inspired by Tim Ferris’ 4-hour work week book. My own definition of 10% engineer is as follow:

10% engineer is a 10x engineer who has high degree of efficiency thus only requiring to work 10% of the time to accomplish similar result expected out of them.

In this post I’ll outline from bird-eye view the ingredient to become a 10% engineer which I’ve mentioned briefly in the previous post:

1. Become a 10x engineer.

2. Crystal clear on what’s expected out of you (even if you’re the one who’s making expectations yourself).

3. Be insanely efficient.

Let’s get started!

Be a 10x Engineer

Become a 10x engineer is not easy, but it’s not impossible. It might take years or even decades until we are comfortable operating as a 10x engineer. Since we’ve discussed how to become a 10x engineer in another post, I am here to resume that knowledge with the easier 10x engineer archetype to be a 10% engineer.

The principle of which 10x engineer can easily become 10% engineer is about how many leverages you can push to create impacts and how good you’re at pushing those leverages collectively. The leverage here means a tool/media/activities to produce value per unit of time invested.

For example, if your only leverage in a project/product/organization is the coding skill and debugging, you only have 2 leverages. But if you’re capable of shaping the organization structure, career alignments, design sense, building culture, and making product/team strategy, then you have an extra 5 leverages you can play with.

The simple explanation why having more leverage help is there’s more way for you to influence the project in the right direction (and inversely, more ways for you to screw up as well). This means:

1. You can put your thoughts, knowledge, creativity, and skill into multiple places where it could’ve been a blocker/bottleneck to the project.

2. At 10x engineer level your contribution will generate multipliers. The 2 simplest examples of multipliers are building automation through coding (thus you don’t have to do repetitive tasks), and mentoring people (thus you have more hands who can help you).

3. It’s arguably easier and faster to become the top 80% percentile at 5 different things than to become the top 99% percentile at one thing (Pareto Principle).

4. There’s also a diminishing return on investing more time on single leverage (yet another Pareto Principle).

For the aforementioned reason, it’s implied that the easiest 10x engineer to become the 10% engineer is the PM Hybrid while the hardest 10x engineer to become the 10% engineer is Coding Machine.

Multiple leverages to push, multiple ways to generate values

There’s a diminishing return to putting too much force on the levers

The next thing you have to do is to make sure you set the right expectation with your manager/leader/yourself that you will be accountable for these extra directions you’re pushing the project to.

Setting Up Clear Expectation

Setting up expectations with your manager/leader/yourself is critical as a 10x engineer and even more so as a 10% engineer. The term 10x engineers came through the speed and quality of someone getting into the goal, 10x faster and better compared to normal engineers. Thus setting up expectation and goal become a critical part of getting to both 10x and 10% engineer.

There’s also a clear difference between setting up goals vs setting up expectations. A goal is a target you want to get into. An expectation is not only about the target, but also the mean and the velocity to get to that target.

How does knowing goal and expectation help us to become a 10% engineer? Knowing your expectations forces you to answers the why, what, when, where, and how questions of a product/project/organization. Why is the most important, and usually, the non-negotiable question you want to know. You want your how and when to be as flexible as possible. The more flexible these 2 variables are the more options open up for a more effective and efficient way to accomplish your goal compared to what’s expected. And finally, the more efficient you are to meet the goal vs expectation the less you have to work.

This is why having a good manager/leader is very important to your journey to becoming a 10% engineer. The rule of thumb to find such manager is they are managers who have managed managers (i.e. not a frontline manager). This is because the result of managers’ promotion (usually after proving their skill) is bigger roles and responsibilities, which means managing a bigger team, possibly multiple teams or organizations. One of my friends said: if you’ve ventured into management and stuck for being a frontline manager for > 4 years then maybe you’re just not cut out to become a manager.

The last thing about setting up expectations that you need to know is about setting up boundaries. In a product/project, engineers usually are not the only people working on it. There will be product managers, designers, marketing team, sales team, customer support, UX researcher, etc. As a senior engineer or above you usually will be accountable not only for the project deliverables but also the success metrics of the overall project (this also depends on the culture of the company). You need to acknowledge that engineering is only one part that will make a project successful. The project may fail because the marketing team doesn’t know the target customer. The project may be delayed because the UX researchers are still queueing on user feedback.

Sometimes you will feel the itch to help your cross-functional partner team - which generally is good behavior, but inefficient. This is the moment where you need to draw the right boundaries whether you will help (especially if you’re PM Hybrid), or just do nothing about it and possibly let the project fail. Realize that when you do nothing, you are not working (intentionally or not) - allowing you to factually work less. The art is how to accurately spot these “bottlenecks” so you can plan your downtime, but at the same time still making sure the project is successful (otherwise you’ll get fired for too many failed projects). There are a few ethical and A LOT of unethical ways to accomplish this which I am going to discuss in a separate post.

Be Super Efficient

To preface the discussion, I’d love to discuss the distinction between effective vs efficient. I like to compare effectiveness to accuracy and efficiency to precision for visualization purposes.

Accuracy vs Precision is like Effective vs Efficient

Being accurate means you can shoot closer to the target - being precise means your subsequent shots are close to each other. To win a game you want to be both accurate and precise. But if you have to chose which skill to practice first to get the best score, choosing to improve accuracy is better than improving precision.

Similarly, it’s more important to be effective first before you try to be efficient. Being effective means you are working toward the right goal - being efficient means you get there fast. The Effective Engineers by Edmond Lau is a great read to help us to become effective engineers. I’ll discuss my version on how to become an effective engineer in another post(s).

Now that you have considered yourself effective, what are all the different ideas you need to consider to be more efficient and turn you to a 10% engineer? I have the following non-exhaustive list:

Start with your life and make them efficient. You’ll be surprised at how many chores occupying our mind space and taking our time: washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming the carpet, remembering to pay insurance and mortgages. Your mind space and time are a very precious resource that is often neglected. Your mind space especially is very important to allow you to be creative, which allows you to be more effective and efficient. Find a way to get your daily life chores done by someone/something else.

Don’t like cleaning? Let Roomba do it for you. Don’t waste your time

Eliminate work using the 80:20 Pareto Principle. You don’t have to do everything. Depending on your goal, it’s ok to cut corners and accomplish 80% of the goal. This helps you to only work 20% of what’s expected. This doesn’t always work depending on what’s expected out of you, so always make sure you set up the correct expectation.

Knowledge is expensive. Gathering knowledge, be it technical knowledge, product knowledge, people’s pulse/happiness level, and domain knowledge, is a time-consuming process. You can dramatically short-circuit this learning process (I am talking about saving up to multiple years) by having 1-hour discussion with experts. You don’t want any expert though - you need someone whose communication style fits yours (so you can learn faster) and you trust (so you don’t have to double-check the information).

Find and develop your team. People are one of the oldest known multipliers to your time and effort. Put enough time to onboard, give context, motivate and course-correct them, then the right people will give you a massive return to your time investment. These people don’t necessarily have to be more junior than you. They can be the tech lead from another team. They can be the lead designer. They can be the rotational product manager. To do this need to lead by influence, not by authority.

Stay in one domain because knowledge, efficiency, and social capital compounds. In the tech industry, it’s very common to jump ship to other companies for various reasons (bored, better compensations). My advice is if you’re in the right team and company: don’t. You need the domain knowledge and social capital to become 10x engineers and 10% engineers which you only get by staying in one domain for a while. One of my skip managers at Facebook told me this:

I think it’s common for people to optimize for small money by jumping between companies, especially on E5 level below (E5 is senior level at Facebook). Then again, those are small money. The big money is in E6+ (E6 is staff level at Facebook). To get to E6+ you need to gather knowledge and expertise. You need to push the limit. Usually to get there you need to stay for a prolonged amount of time in a team or domain.

This might have been a trick to make me stay in his team for longer (spoiler: it worked). But check out Facebook E6+ compensation and compare it with other companies and other levels and you’ll know why I think he might be saying the truth.

To Sum It Up

TLDR of this post:

1. Maximize your leverage (value produced per unit of time spent) and the number of leverages to reduce the amount of work you have to do. Becoming a PM Hybrid is the best way to achieve this.

2. Set the right expectation. Not only the goal, but also the pace and the flexibility of execution you’re allowed to have. Not only with your manager, but also with your cross-functional partner (to set boundaries), your team, your skip manager, and yourself.

3. Be effective first, then be efficient.

4. Pareto Principle (80:20 rule). Apply it in all 3 points above.

When you do everything correctly, you should start hearing this conversation at work:

Your manager: “my manager (your skip) and I have been discussing a promo package for you for this half….”

Other team’s engineering manager: “thank you so much for giving opportunities to Brian to make a massive impact this year! That project shows sufficient technical complexity, cross-functional coordination, and impact for senior-level engineers. Do you mind championing him in his promotion discussion next month?”

Designer: “thank you for your insight during the design sprint! Your input saved us 3 weeks of possibly useless user research. And your idea will make the test have more statistically significant data that we can analyze compared to the user research.”

Your coworker: “please be honest and tell me - WHEN DO YOU WORK? I’ve only seen you looking at cat videos all the time at your desk!”