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The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

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Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#91

Post by danschumann »

"There are only a handful of people who can tell the difference between you and me, but I'm one of them" - Professor from Good Will Hunting

The main difference (besides using vim) of a 10x programmer, is being able to immediately envision 5 ways to solve the problem, mentally following that path and seeing the pros and cons of each.

The 10x programmer probably does really hard stuff on weekends for fun.

The 10x programmer doesn't give a shit about your paradigms if they don't make the code more maintainable.

The 10x programmer's code is fun to read.

The 10x programmer's code could be read by a non-programmer and they could understand the jist of it.

The 10x programmer can't tell you the 'most interesting bug' they've ever found. The solve bugs all the time. They solve them and move on, and remember the lesson, but not the bug.

The 10x programmer doesn't fit in well at the office and usually has to start his own business.

He also types fast.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#93

Post by UK-AL »

ajuc wrote: post #54
no_gravity wrote: post #16

I have no doubt that there are programmers who are 10x as productive as other programmers. I witnessed it over and over. But as I understand it, the "10x" means 10 times the productivity of an average programmer. I wonder how productive the average programmer is. I find this question super interesting. For example, I see more and more programmers who use "Query Builders" and "ORM layers" without understanding the und…

This is not only about frameworks and ORMs, it's about refusing to comprehensively understand stuff before you use it or change it. It can be any abstractions, even (usually) the ones you created by yourself. It's easier to add a special case check, than to read through the codebase to see if it's even needed, or, God forbid, to refactor in 5 places so it's not needed (it might break sth else!!! I would have to read…

I think types should not be nullable unless explicitly specified.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#94

Post by pavel_lishin »

danschumann wrote: post #91

"There are only a handful of people who can tell the difference between you and me, but I'm one of them" - Professor from Good Will Hunting The main difference (besides using vim) of a 10x programmer, is being able to immediately envision 5 ways to solve the problem, mentally following that path and seeing the pros and cons of each. The 10x programmer probably does really hard stuff on weekends for fun. The 10x progr…

> The 10x programmer doesn't fit in well at the office and usually has to start his own business.

Is a 10x programmer also a 10x businessman?

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#95

Post by ch4s3 »

fnord123 wrote: post #58
Bahamut wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a huge cost to handwriting SQL too that one mist be careful of - it is very easy to result in poor abstractions as a result of inconsistent apis from lack of abstraction over SQL. My company is currently in the process of moving back to an ORM after 5 years or so abandoning ORM usage due to nightmarish performance using NHibernate in .Net (maybe more of an indictment on the code than anything else, but I don…

> inconsistent data fields being returned by various queries, resulting in inconsistent api endpoint data returned to the client and thus inability to safely abstract without significant hacks/nebulous data model state. You are coding against actual queries? Why not functions to hide the table abstractions: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-createfun... https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/create-…

>Why not functions to hide the table abstractions

Isn't that roughly what an ORM/ODM is?

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#97

Post by QuantumGravy »

> 10-fold difference between the best programmers and the worst.

He cites this as evidence and still goes on to talk as if the observed 10x-ers were 10x average. Then he tries moving the goalpost, with talk of high-level project decisions and code not written. Just come out and say, "A true 10x programmer does X, Y, and Z. A true 10x programmer would never do A, B, and C." Sounds more like a certain fallacy involving Scotsman when phrased that way.

The only saving grace is that he backs off and recommends against a hiring strategy targeted solely at ninja rock-star devs, but then he reinforces the boogeyman of negative programmers

I get that some people are good. There's nothing outlandish about Peopleware's cited figure of 2.5x average programmers, but that's not so incredible that the 1x devs need be weeded out. There must also be a handful of developers with IQs of 160 walking around, but there's too much demand for talent to act as if such rarities are the baseline of who's employable. None of this is worth continuing to blog about.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#100

Post by vog »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #85

I had a boss 25 years ago (smart guy, did compiler work, etc. for new computer architectures) who claimed that there was really a 100x factor difference from the best to the worse. I believe this: would you rather have one day of work from Daphne Koller, Peter Norvig, or Jeff Dean - or 100 days from an average developer? Well, the answer is that "it depends." There is a ton of work that can be effectively done by non…

> I don't think I could conceive of and write TensorFlow in 10 years of work.

Don't understimate the human ability to learn. 10 years are plenty of time to learn the math and to find good code structures.

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