The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

There may or may not be 10x programmers - I, personally, find the reasoning in the article convincing. And I think there may be programmers that vastly outperform others in programming tasks. So I think there may be 10x programmers.

But, I believe it does not really matter (at least most of the time, most meaning something like 99%).

We are working in teams, inside a company that has a certain culture, rules and processes. How we work together as a team and how the company/culture/system we work in helps us in / prevents us from doing our work has a much greater influence in overall results than individual programmer performance.

This also includes how the system supports us in learning (not only formal training, even though this might be beneficial) and teaching. Teaching each other skills needed for the job, and learning how to work together so that we amplify our collective skills and dampen our shortcomings.

You could extend that logic: Since I couldn't code at some point in time and I can now, I've become infinitely better at it.

Compared to someone that can't code I'm infinitely faster in theory. Do note that in reality, if someone that can't code needs to write code, he'll likely learn to code first. However, once he learns to write code, he is no longer someone that can't write code.

The 10x programmer isn't 10 times nothing, of course. The 10 times rule is, I think, 10 times better than average. So we have to know the average first.

The amount of programmers rises very fast: IIRC, the amount of programmers doubles every 6 years or so. The average programmer therefore has 6 years experience.

The 10 times programmer has to be 10 times better than that. How is he 10 times better? He has to be able to beat a 10-person team of people with 6 years experience on average. That is a team of 4 juniors with 4 years experience, 3 "medium" programmers with 8 years experience and 2 senior programmers with 10 years of experience.

Imagine a contest where you have to develop a huge SAAS management-like system. One team has the 7 developers described above. The other team is the solo mythical 10 times developer.

Well, I think the 10 times developer is going to have a head start, but he's going to burn out within 2 months, releasing nothing and starting a new project somewhat later. The project manager now has to find a new 10 times developer, but he finds out that no-one can replace him and they need to start over.

Meanwhile, the 7 developers are playing table-tennis and having boring meetings and finish the product much later than planned, but it is done and it sells fine.

There are actually just millions or billions of discrete points, one for each programmer. Implying that they can be approximated by some kind of continuous gradient is quite frankly insane and unfounded.

Also I think in the 60s there were analysts, the people who solved the problem and programmers, the people who converted the solution to code.

Anyway, in the 60s the profession was in its infancy, so I'm not sure how much studies from this era matter today.

> Imagine traffic increases exponentially, and this average team setup an average website, with a data storage engine that’s hard to shard, hosting that doesn’t have enough redundancy, version control without proper backup, no CI environment, and no monitoring. How productive will those 10 coders be if they are spending all their time putting out fires?

The 10x developer may or may not be a myth, but the idea that you can design your system for exponential traffic increase without any tradeoffs is not engineering, it's fantasy. I guess "no silver bullet" is dead in the year 2017.