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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)

#121

Post by michaelmrose »

EliRivers wrote: post #66
merraksh wrote: post #3

[...] 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…

I thought the perceived idea about the 10x developer was that he/she is 10x better than the average programmer, not the worst 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…

10x the worst literally means nothing at all if you find a sufficiently bad programmer you can have an infinity times programmer and the 10x developer as it is normally expressed is 10x average.

Further author even punts at the end of article by claiming that its not needed to measure difficult to measure things as we can instead reason our way to the right answer which is practically nonsensical. Measuring is step one in actually reasoning about things.

In short author may be a good developer but he is certainly not a 10x author.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

zeofig wrote: post #25
Danihan wrote: post #12

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.

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by Bartweiss »

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…

> 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

This is my core complaint. All software development is (eventually) rate-limited somewhere other than developer brilliance. Most business software hits this limit fast.

A huge portion of business software is stuff you can't solve with brilliance - tasks from integrating with other companies to building out simple new features happen at the speed of spec development, email responses, or other non-development limits.

If the 10x myth makes employers expect 10x productivity from certain devs, or even 5x, it's badly misleading them. Not always, there are compiler companies and ML firms and whatever else that need brilliance, but I think most companies that advertiser for 10x developers are usually limited by forces 10x development can't help with.

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

michaelmrose wrote: post #121
EliRivers wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the perceived idea about the 10x developer was that he/she is 10x better than the average programmer, not the worst 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…

10x the worst literally means nothing at all if you find a sufficiently bad programmer you can have an infinity times programmer and the 10x developer as it is normally expressed is 10x average. Further author even punts at the end of article by claiming that its not needed to measure difficult to measure things as we can instead reason our way to the right answer which is practically nonsensical. Measuring is step o…

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by marcosdumay »

psyc wrote: post #108
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.

An order of magnitude of what?

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

#126

Post by jfv »

Like so many discussions that bring out the same old discussions year after year, this one is marred by

1) Oversimplification

2) Arguing over semantics

The term 10x engineer is particularly bad because it implies something: that some engineers are just generally 10 times more productive than others. I'm pretty sure most engineers would be vehemently opposed to their performance or value being quantified, so why do we even bother arguing about it?

If I remember right, this term was inspired by some study that showed that some students did their CS homework at a school (CMU?) 10x faster than other students, and the implication that some engineers are just that much better than others as to deserve distinction.

Anyway, this is obviously true. There are some things that simply can't be written or designed by the average coder (or teams of average coders, for that matter), say important bits of the Linux kernel, key optimizations for your latest AAA titles, hairy distributed protocols, etc. No amount of project management will turn a team of average coders into one able to produce such things. In these case, the exceptional coders are more like ∞x than 10x.

And in other cases, you might only see a marginal improvement in performance if at all. If the task is particularly dull, a previously ∞x coder might turn completely unproductive.

Can we just all agree the term is stupid, evokes a sort of reliance on metrics we all hate, that hiring a team is more complicated than assigning value to coders and maximizing, and just move on?

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

#128

Post by TimJYoung »

icebraining wrote: post #88
fnord123 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

That's essentially building an ORM (well, a data mapping layer) out of PL/SQL functions rather than your main language. Why would that be better?

I think he's saying that there was a lot of duplication in the client SQL for various applications (copy/paste, probably). Using SQL functions/procedures/views to return the same result sets would eliminate the duplication and provide "one true source" for such queries. Plus, it would reside in the actual database, allowing it to be portable and not requiring any extra work in the client applications.

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

#129

Post by mabbo »

fahadkhan wrote: post #99
mabbo wrote: post #84

I wasn't sure I believed in 10x developers, then I thought "I've worked with people 3.2 times more productive than me, and I've also worked with people 3.2 times less productive than me..."

Wow, it's even better 10.24x developers exist!

There may be some rounding errors involved in my assessment :)
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