Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

ybrikman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 248 posts

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

#131

Post by TimJYoung »

kharak wrote: post #68
sleepychu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Hopefully you mean 1x! 0x would be pretty untenable ;-)) How much more experience do they have than you? Do you feel like you learn new things?

Maybe 0.5x? I'm sure I had a negative performance impact on my former team. They would have been faster doing all features by themselves instead of reviewing and correcting my pull requests. New team isn't as good as the other one, but I'm still behind. 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 res…

Do you like software development, in general ? In other words, is there something that you've worked on in the past that you were passionate about, and found yourself thinking about, even when not "working" ?

If the answer to any of the above is "yes", then you may just need to find another job that better suits your interests and needs in terms of career progression. Software development jobs can vary greatly in terms of being interesting/challenging. Being on a big development team is sometimes not the best option for developers that are just starting out. There's simply not enough room to grow and explore because your work environment is so rigid and pre-determined by others.

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

#132

Post by fahadkhan »

mabbo wrote: post #129
fahadkhan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

You can't be expected to exact as the square root of 10 is irrational. Perhaps that says something about the 10x developers.

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

#133

Post by hobls »

The area that I see this really come into play is with problems that the developer initially doesn't know how to solve. Some developers learn and adapt 10x faster than the average developer, and it seems like they're never blocked.

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

#134

Post by JimboOmega »

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'd argue that if such a multiplier exists, it's infinite - there are completely non-productive engineers in the world.

And I don't just mean on the scale of a day (we've all had those) - there's a reason FizzBuzz was a thing; there are people with no practical coding ability nonetheless interviewing for engineering jobs. Somewhere, one of them got hired. Somewhere, they were able to BS - or download already prepared software that did what they were supposed to code - and keep that job.

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

#135

Post by yoklov »

hobls wrote: post #133

The area that I see this really come into play is with problems that the developer initially doesn't know how to solve. Some developers learn and adapt 10x faster than the average developer, and it seems like they're never blocked.

IME a more common case is overengineering. Not only does this slow someone down initially, but the extra complexity often continues to slow them (and anybody else in the same codebase) into the future.

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

#136

Post by sqeaky »

nojvek wrote: post #110
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 nee…

At first I read this like a brag, but then I realized you meant that your skills lie in one place and not another. So perhaps it is like this for many. Maybe many under-performing devs are simply not in an area engaging to them, but they are doing something to get their bills paid.

If so how do we address such a problem?

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

#137

Post by kgu »

jononor wrote: post #60
kgu wrote: post #51

Arguing that 10x developers don't exist strikes me as the extraordinary position requiring extraordinary evidence, rather than the inverse. People vary; why wouldn't they here? Some people argue, essentially, "programming is complicated," but even if you want to claim that programming consists of multiple dimensions along which programmers can be measured, how about when one person outperforms another on every dimens…

People vary yes, but do we have 10x variation in performance? Actually for 10x to be a meaningful size, would need significantly more variation. Can one find support for such level of variation in other, more well studied fields? Say students, managers, factory workers?

Sorry for the downvotes; I upvoted you to correct. I think it's an interesting question. There are probably fields where it's possible and fields where it's not.

Some students certainly outperform others by a factor of ten. I'd hesitate to score managers numerically, but it seems plausible that working for one could feel ten times more smooth or whatever than working for another, whatever that means. Intuitively, probably not factory workers, but prove me wrong.

10x is not actually that much. I could play basketball with Michael Jordan or chess with Magnus Carlsen, and they'd win essentially an infinite number of games against me without losing once. That doesn't mean they're infinitely better, because theoretically I could through practice become as good as them, but the factor is way more than 10.

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

#138

Post by Spooky23 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #94
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?

Perhaps there are many roads to 10x!

What if 'x' is transitive? Is the 10x programmer, 10x businessman 100x?

That might explain things. I've seen plenty of 0.5x programmers who are 20x bullshit artists.

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

#139

Post by skybrian »

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…

Keep in mind there typically is a large team behind projects like this, and they probably had experience with previous designs to build on.

You're comparing a single person to a whole community of PhD's. Getting up to speed enough to be a useful member of such a community is more doable.

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

#140

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

manmal wrote: post #119
jacquesm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Metal molding seems to be eating the world better than software.
Post reply on HN