41–50 of 248 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a thousand gradients of skill level, dividing it into 2 or 3 stereotypes is facile and pointless.
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.
the 10x is just the guy that's already overcome this blocker that a more junior coder could spend a day on, and if the company doesn't encourage teamwork the junior is still taking a day and the senior is appearing 10x when he should be assisting other coders.
there's more value in a team being 3x than one person being 10x.
I find the arguments in the "Programming is about choices" section a bit contrieved. Yes, if you have a small team of say 10 people, a very competent lead engineer can make all the difference by setting up proper testing, SCM, CI, etc. i.e., by choosing the right tools and people for the job. However, as soon as you have a slightly larger team, these decisions will usually not be made by one single person. If you hav…
Another interpretation of this is that 10x programmers get dragged down when they have to work on teams that are too large or don't grant autonomy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a thousand gradients of skill level, dividing it into 2 or 3 stereotypes is facile and pointless.
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.
It all depends on the job to be done and being the right fit. But some people have this talent and skill to make the right decisions split second, over and over again.
I definitely prefer one 6x dev over 6 average developers that are creating a horrible spaghetti of bad ideas and poor decisions, not talking about all the meetings they need to align and try to fix the mess they continuously create themselves.
"They found no relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or productivity." and "From years of experience, a great programmer will know that errors are much more costly to fix later." So which is it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe this is an easy trap for developers of all skill levels to find themselves in. I imagine the "10x developer" would just be really good at avoiding this kind of thing ... most of the time.
Yosefk.com has a great article about being 10x more effective by being 10x more selective.
Would somebody then, instead, be able to become 10x more effective by thinking 10x more about their work, before they do it?
> 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 yo…
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... (page 11)
Additionally, one thing the best programmers I know have all drilled into me is don't write code speculatively. You should write code because it solves the problem you have now, not the problem you think you're going to have in a couple years. It's very much a novice mistake (one that I've made a dozen or so times, sigh) to think that you can jump straight to your "ideal" architecture without any of the steps or missteps along the way.