Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's called project management fwiw.
Turning 1x performance into 2x performance is people management.
Tools writing.
The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
111–120 of 248 posts
Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#112I 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…
You can say the same of artists...there is certainly a huge difference between the best and the worst. That's taking to broad of a view IMHO.
You aren't, generally, going to hire a Picasso. Picasso will be off being Picasso.
You also aren't going to hire Greg, the guy who took one art class in middle school who just decided last month that he's going to be a artist.
What we are really talking about is the 'artist of the line'. Accessible professionals. Yes, there is still a spectrum there but it is more in the 10x territory. And some are 10x for very particular work and some for others.
What gets me with the whole 10x thing is the idea that a 10x developer in one particular circumstance can be dropped in another and be expected to perform at that same level. That's not how it works.
Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#113Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#114[...] They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years' experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1 I thought the perceived idea about the 10x developer was that he/she is 10x better than the average programmer, not the worst. So even this scientific study (from the 60s) says that there aren't 10x developers according to this defi…
The trouble with comparing the best to the worst is that there's really no floor for how bad a programmer can be. If an average programmer takes ten minutes to do a task, and a great one takes four, how long does an incompetent one take? Twenty minutes, thirty, an hour or two, never...?
Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#115After doing an extraordinary number of technical interviews of people, I began to think of it as a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. Despite headhunter filtering, resume filtering, and short phone interviews, one out of six people slips through those filters without knowing much. On the other hand, one out of six can answer pretty much every question, clearly and in some depth. These are the people, the unprepared and the very prepared, who are one standard deviation below and above the mean. Insofar as the other four of the six, they all are more-or-less average. They are working at the job, and are competent, but minimally. They can give basic answers, but can't go into much depth on most topics. They are kind of an amorphous blob that blend into each other.
For example, I used to ask sysadmin/devops people what syslog was. One of six would not know, four of six would give a basic answer, one of six would give a more in-depth answer. Then I would ask what syslog's various facilities were and what the severity levels were. Only one of the six would give a good answer.
Actually, I program Android now, but knowing the order of severity is still useful as it is in the same order in the Log class (althouh they add one beyond DEBUG - VERBOSE).
Once I read an article about the top people at Google, and they claimed these people are three standard devíations above the mean. I noted that the author saw this in the same pattern I did.
Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#116I 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 use TensorFlow, but looking at the concept and implementation, I don't think I could conceive of and write TensorFlow in 10 years of work.
And this is exactly why software is eating the world. Once written it stays written and all those people that could not write something like TensorFlow if their life depended on it are able to use it as if they could.
Abstraction is a super powerful thing, all this building on the knowledge and capability of those that came before is what makes the whole thing possible in the first place. Probably the people that wrote TensorFlow would not be able to design (each of them individually) the computers that it runs on, or the operating system that allows them to run TensorFlow in the first place.
Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#117I 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…
You can say the same of artists...there is certainly a huge difference between the best and the worst. That's taking to broad of a view IMHO. You aren't, generally, going to hire a Picasso. Picasso will be off being Picasso. You also aren't going to hire Greg, the guy who took one art class in middle school who just decided last month that he's going to be a artist. What we are really talking about is the 'artist of…
Google did hire Peter Norvig, if I'm not mistaken. I very much doubt his job is to write programs for them, though.
Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#118There are two kinds of developers: 1. Those who are good developers 2. Those who can't write any real code (cargo cult or cut&paste developers, e.g. the 25% who I didn't hire over the years because they were not able to FizzBuzz)(25%-50% of the market) The 10x comes from comparing (1) and (2) - although dividing anything by 0 is larger than 10x.
25%-50% of the market? Where do you find them? I've never seen a programmer unable to write at least a fizzbuzz.
Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#119I 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 use TensorFlow, but looking at the concept and implementation, I don't think I could conceive of and write TensorFlow in 10 years of work. And this is exactly why software is eating the world. Once written it stays written and all those people that could not write something like TensorFlow if their life depended on it are able to use it as if they could . Abstraction is a super powerful thing, all this building o…
I agree very much. Just came to say that this has always been the case with the know-how of starting fires, metal molding, forging tools and weapons, inventing microscopy, large scale industrial processes, computers... software is the extension of the exponential acceleration of abstraction and reuse that our society was built on.
Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
#120The problem with this 10X myth is that no one ever defines X. Lines of code? Inverse of defects found? Delivering in 1/10 of estimates? There is no definitive way to measure the end result of what people develop and any of these values can be gamed. Clearly there are major differences between programmers but turning it into math is not really possible.