Why talent is both overrated and underrated

“We need to find 10x engineers”

This was a common refrain I heard during my tenure as director of engineering. Everyone in the Valley seems to be on the lookout for this elusive unicorn: the 10x engineer that can leap tall technical debt in a single bound and single-handedly save a doomed project. Throughout my career, I’ve interviewed and hired hundreds of candidates, but the question always nagged me: What exactly is a 10x engineer? Contemplating this question led me down a rabbit hole to another question: What exactly is talent? And how do you find and measure it?

This question was not trivial or theoretical for me. Every quarter, our company gathered all of the managers together to debate the fate of our employees. Far from being an abstract concept, the answer to this question affected the destinies of tens of thousands of people. In smoke-filled (not really) conference rooms, managers fiercely debated the virtues of their direct reports. The stakes were high, as the end result was a zero-sum game. Every employee at the company was essentially stack ranked against one another. The ones at the top were handsomely rewarded, and the ones at the bottom were also handsomely rewarded…with a one time severance check.

This triggered fierce debates. What makes one person more talented than another? Is talent innate or can it be learned? I thought about world class talents like Lebron James and Serena Williams. Anyone who is a champion in their field obviously has a ton of talent. But there seem to be other successful people that do not seem to possess world class talent.

Eventually, I started to look inward. Was I talented? As I broke down each of my individual talents, I came to a sobering conclusion: I wasn’t really exceptional at anything. I’m a decent enough coder, but I’m not winning a Turing Award anytime soon. I know some business, but I doubt I could outcompete the average MBA for a job. I love basketball, but I’ve been waiting for my Warriors training camp invitation for a while. Maybe they lost my e-mail address.

A few years ago, I discovered a tremendously helpful concept: the talent stack. Originally coined by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, a talent stack can be thought of as:

A collection of skills that work in tandem to dramatically increase your value to the world.

More than an academic theory, it gave me a self improvement framework that I still use to this day. As I looked at my own talents as well as those around me, I noticed a pattern: The effects of pairing the right talents with the right situation are not merely additive, but exponential. As I think back to what made my acquisition possible, I realized my particular talent stack was unique. I had average to slightly above-average talent in the following areas: Computer science, marketing, negotiations, sales, fantasy sports, and mobile app development. Taken in isolation, none of those talents is striking in and of themselves. But taken as a whole, they are a potent combination in the right situation. As luck would have it, I found the perfect situation. Or, should I say, that situation found me.

When I look back at colleagues that have managed to make a huge impact in our organization, most of the time it wasn’t because they were 10x better at any one thing. Rather, it was because they brought a perspective from a completely different discipline and breathed fresh air into a problem we were stuck on.

So instead of looking for 10x engineers, we should have been looking for well-rounded people with a diverse set of talents that could make a 10x impact if properly coached and motivated.

As a fun exercise, take a look at your own talents, and stack rank them on a list and put a number from 1–10 next to each talent (1 being beginner, 5 being average, and 10 being world class). Then ask yourself these two questions when evaluating a new opportunity:

• Will this opportunity allow me to use a combination of two or more of these talents to make a 10x impact?
• What can I add to my current talent stack that can stack exponentially with the rest of my talents?

I’ve found that the talent stack framework makes learning new skills and hobbies a lot more fun. Instead of taking on a new hobby in isolation, I ask myself how mastery in this hobby will affect my talent stack. It’s like a role playing game irl, where I can strategically choose where to spend my XP that will provide maximum attribute boosts to other skills.

What do you think? Is this a helpful framework for thinking about your own talent development?