The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

First, it's elitist. This isn't a professional athletics team, this is the workplace focused on engineering. Most places are not chock-full of the 10x'ers; I need to depend on other people to do things for me, and them on me; not all of us are 10x'ers, and it behooves all of us to work as a team. The 10x discussion distracts from that: a functioning team. Further, people seem to want to worship these "10x" programmers and forget about training anyone; we'll just hire 10x-ers only.

Second,

> 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.

This is exactly the output I imagine coming from a "10x" programmer: that person has been able to output at such a constant clip by writing code with enormous technical debt. I've had to work on these systems, and they're a PITA: how productive could I be if I didn't have to deal with the decisions of the guy who, judging by the codebase, was shoveling code out the door as quickly as possible?

(i.e., what if a study held the programmer constant, and varied the environment? I bet I could be much more productive if I worked on a codebase that didn't fight me at every turn.)

Last, the assumption; the article claims there are numerous studies on the matter … and cites none. What we get is a SE answer that contains a dead link to an article containing citations, which thankfully was quoted in the SE answer (but screw hyperlinking to anything). The first I can't find, the second's abstract doesn't seem to support the notion of 10x's ("Understanding and Controlling Software Costs"; the abstract indicates that it's about understanding software cost estimation[1]), the third is a book, not a study, the forth is a study wherein the participants are told to use different methods of implementing the solution (the research appears paywalled, so I can only see the abstract; and thus, doesn't apply), the next is too vague to tell as it "summarizes the results of […] investigations in the areas of design practices, coding techniques, test/verification methods, and computer utilization" and is paywalled, the next seems relevant but is paywalled, paywalled, paywalled, this is also a book ("Peopleware"), this is also a book ("Software Productivity"), this one is relevant and available[2], but it doesn't look like a very big sample?, and the last two I've lost motivation to find.

[1]: https://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/2147/c6218db2e35d40f4a7...

[2]: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/645438.pdf

That could well be what people perceive. It's not what the studies said. While the article has some good references, I might as well quote Peopleware again just for the fun of it. I churn this out every so often:

A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance.

The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work.

Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

I've learned quit a lot in the former team, the new team on the other hand.. I've hardly coded anything this year. I work with code, but I don't build stuff. As a result, my coding skill progression stopped almost completely, while general IT skills improved somewhat. In my former job, I was able to work at my own pace and do everything by myself (SQL dev). I believe I was good there. But now? Working with big systems in Java developed by others in unknown frameworks, done by high skilled people.. I suck.