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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)

#101

Post by awkward »

The reason for pushback on the idea 10x programmers isn't the real gradient of skill, it's the labor aspect. Lots of companies want to hire 10x without paying 10x dollars, and they've figured out that blowing smoke up the ass of young people (though it works better on young men than women) is a way to squeeze blood from that stone.

Especially if you're working in a small company, you're going to hit a point when there is a massive wall of work to be done, bigger than you would ever be able to handle alone, and your organization will fail if you don't do it. The skills you need to actually handle that situation are going to be more in the vein of basic professionalism than technical talent. Better programmers might need a bigger wall before things get rough, but they will still hit it.

The reason for criticizing the 10x idea isn't that it doesn't exist, the reason is because feeds into myths that might end up being harmful far beyond the actionable decisions it lets you make.

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

#102

Post by dahart »

My own productivity fluctuates by more than an order of magnitude. But that means it's not my intrinsic ability. Sometimes it's choices. Most of the time it's who my manager is, what choices the team (or the team before) made, how much I care, and whether I get along with the people I'm working with.

The article is strangely defensive of the number 10 specifically; having discussed this topic here several times I get the feeling most people on HN already agree that there are order of magnitude fluctuations in productivity from person to person at any given time, but that 10 itself is a biblical number -- symbolic and not even meant to be taken literally.

I'm sure 10x has been true somewhere for someone, but there's nothing special -- nor empirical -- about the number 10. There are more people 2x better than average than 10x. The distribution looks like what you'd expect -- peaks at 1 and falls off in either direction.

> You become a 10x programmer not by doing an order of magnitude more work, but by making better decisions an order of magnitude more often.

I think this isn't necessary to be 10x more productive. You can make a single decision and become more productive. You can also use a single philosophy. You can also get yourself in the right company and on the right team surrounded by people who are smart and cooperative instead of competitive, and watch everyone's productivity soar.

The most 10x-famous programmers I know are ruthless about not implementing things until they need them so badly it hurts. And they keep their code really, really, really simple. No cleverness, no tricky bullshit, just super-simple super-readable easy to understand, and literally boring code.

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

#103

Post by ido »

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…

Well the worst (or even simply "kinda bad") are so much worse that it's not hard to believe and even bigger gap exists.

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

#104

Post by tremon »

reducesuffering wrote: post #5

"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?

They found no difference between a programmer with 7 years of experience and a programmer with 25 years of experience.

They did find a difference between a programmer with 7 years of experience and a programmer with no experience.

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

#105

Post by ja30278 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #71
jhh wrote: post #15

Here's a question: Is Picasso a 10x artist? The thing about the 10x claim is that it takes something complex and creative and applies a scalar multiplier to it. Talking about 10x programmers is _semantically_ problematic.

It's a self-serving mythology, because a few individuals can claim to be 10Xers to gain special privileges. It's telling that there's no such thing as industry talent matrix. Instead of general skills - creativity, accuracy, speed, debugging insight, ability to learn new languages/frameworks, team leadership, good-to-have-around vs toxic asshole, and so on - we have this myth of "the rockstar". A certain kind of mana…

There's also a certain kind of person who seems to really want 10x people _not_ to exist.

I'm not a 10x person, but I have worked with some. I don't think they are unique to programming..there are 10x folks in every field.

Sometimes you don't need a 10x person, and if you don't, it can seem like they don't matter. In those cases, a few 1x people will do just as well. But I do believe that sometimes you _do_ need a 10x person, and if you do, you can't do the same things without them. In those cases, I'd absolutely take a 'toxic' 10x person over the nice-but-1x alternative.

Part of the issue is that there's more work for programmers than ever, and most of that work is of the 1x variety.....if you're just banging out CSS for some small-business website, it doesn't matter whether you have Jeff Dean do it, or a new grad from Omaha Community college. If, however, you need to write a new globally consistent database abstraction at scale, then the new grad probably won't cut it. If you actually need that thing, then it wouldn't matter if the new grad was the nicest person on earth, and Jeff Dean the most 'toxic' (though actually I understand that he's a very nice person).

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

#107

Post by paulcole »

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…

Was TensorFlow written by a single person?

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

#108

Post by psyc »

jhh wrote: post #15

Here's a question: Is Picasso a 10x artist? The thing about the 10x claim is that it takes something complex and creative and applies a scalar multiplier to it. Talking about 10x programmers is _semantically_ problematic.

I've always understood it as an approximate order of magnitude.

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

#109

Post by uranian »

sebringj wrote: post #87

Demis Hassabis, John Carmack and Elon Musk ARE 100X developers. Why stop at 10X?

10x developer is just a metaphore, not based on some mathematical model. For me it relates to the difference between an average singer in an average band and Prince or Whitney Houston for example.

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

#110

Post by nojvek »

awkward wrote: post #101

The reason for pushback on the idea 10x programmers isn't the real gradient of skill, it's the labor aspect. Lots of companies want to hire 10x without paying 10x dollars, and they've figured out that blowing smoke up the ass of young people (though it works better on young men than women) is a way to squeeze blood from that stone. Especially if you're working in a small company, you're going to hit a point when ther…

In addition not being able to measure 10x just makes things hairy. Am I a 10x, probably if you ask me to pump a couple of CRUD pages. Am I a 10x in adding features to a compiler. Probably not.

If a business hires me thinking I am a 10x-er they have high hopes that I can't satisfy for their dimension of X.

There are good programmers, great programmers and dangerous programmers. But that's all relative to what work needs to be done.

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