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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)

#181

Post by watwut »

sqeaky wrote: post #136
nojvek wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Management and professionalism. It is possible to do something you don't love out of responsibility and professionalism and it is possible to assign people to tasks they like.

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

#182

Post by watwut »

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…

Imo, the biggest multiplier is good management.

The 10x developer existing means that the field is not really competitive yet and/or there is mismatch between who is trying to work there and what the actual needed aptitude is. Well managed company should facilitter knowledge transfer between people and competitive field should have large enough supply of people (unless the hiring process sux for some reason).

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

#183

Post by watwut »

didibus wrote: post #143

I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. Now, I've seen 10x quality, though sometimes they're a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for…

This came up first time when programmers had more individual autonomy and responsibility then by the book scrum allows for.

The norm used to be that you do module you are responsible for - meaning you can work for few weeks on something biget and alone. At that scope, bad programmer might end up doing mess that is very difficult to finish. If the company does testing and returns bugs to original developer, the developer will be significantly slower.

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

#184

Post by Nomentatus »

iamacynic wrote: post #158
Bartweiss wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 companie…

documentation and customer support can really hurt a young product organization, and these are not solved by brilliance, but rather diligence and patience.

But it's also true that a good design can reduce documentation needs (and documentation/code fragility) by a startling amount - not to mention stop floods of customer support calls before they start. It's certainly true that not every job is a design or analyst job; but you'd better not be wrong about when you need a design task done, and the 1x programmer (or boss) can't make that judgement call for you.

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

#185

Post by sqeaky »

watwut wrote: post #181
sqeaky wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Management and professionalism. It is possible to do something you don't love out of responsibility and professionalism and it is possible to assign people to tasks they like.

I agree it is possible, but it does make it harder to excel.

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

#186

Post by watwut »

ianbicking wrote: post #165
didibus wrote: post #143

I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. Now, I've seen 10x quality, though sometimes they're a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for…

10x productivity is fairly common when onboarding people to a project, though it's not quite so obvious because you'll give the new person small bugs or stories. And if someone is simply not productive, there might continue to be a 10x between team members, and the team keeps giving the unproductive person small or non-essential tasks, and not accounting for the support that member receives to finish that work. I've…

I have seen similar dynamic happen too and would put blame for the situation on the supposed 10x developer.

The result is more likely a conswquence of missing communication about changes being done and badly split tasks/responsibilities. Good senior developer should know not to pull rugs from junior. He should not be rewriting juniors work that often.

I mean seriously, demotivation happening this way means that the 10x dude should not work in team at all - he should have work individually.

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

#187

Post by watwut »

jfv wrote: post #126

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 w…

"say important bits of the Linux kernel, key optimizations for your latest AAA titles, hairy distributed protocols, etc. "

THe thing most people lack in all those examples is body of knowledge, not aptitude. All those areas are learnable by average developer.

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

#188

Post by Nomentatus »

memracom wrote: post #141

It is not the developer that is 10X. It is the environment they work in that is an enabler of 10X productivity. If that environment is also relatively stable, a smart developer can learn all the levers that the environment/company provides to them, and start achieving hyper productivity. But move that developer to a different company and they could be a dud. Even just an increase in the instability of the environment…

Some people have read far more than ten times as many math and programming books than others, and spent far more than ten times as much time making sure they thoroughly understand what they've read; and then gone on to tackle ten times as many hairy projects on the edge than others because it was fun for them.

True, an environment can encourage the laggards to catch up or fire 'em if they have no interest in improving their skills and knowledge; but it can't wave a wand and create the skills. I would also note that there are tenX (plus) refactorers who can freely cut large amounts of code from large projects without risk, too.

If you started tackling mathematical puzzles when you were eight, and programming a couple years later you're a different species than someone who switched majors to computing in third year for financial reasons; the early starter's brain is actually physically different (for instance some of your visual cortex and memory will now likely be devoted to math and logic instead of geography, this has been measured in chess players.) Same with a concert pianist vs someone who started playing the piano at age 20. Sure, the environment of the concert hall or practice hall matters - just not nearly that much.

I agree we do need to spend more time paying off boring technical debt, too; though that's not getting much more popular.

I don't want to leave the wrong impression. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing a very conscientious job of coding and recoding that a whole lot of others could also do, just with a better ethic and constant attention to detail - we need many more such coders too, and I honor them very much.

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

#189

Post by BoiledCabbage »

acdha wrote: post #175
vinceguidry wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've personally rewritten an app in less than a week that had two devs on it for over 6 months. Their deliverable didn't really work at all, even after the 1+ minute loading time To be fair, a lot of that six months was probably just nailing down the requirements. Your rewrite enjoyed having that design work already done. I'd argue that building applications is 90% design, 10% code. The code part can balloon to a g…

The only time I've had improvements on that scale, it felt almost like cheating: the previous consulting company had spent ~8 months coding but the developers didn't understand functions or how to do a SQL WHERE constraint. Simply moving redundant code into an include file and getting rid off all of the cases where they were looping over some massive cross product looking for a record ID was good for ~4 orders of mag…

Whatever people thing of flashy trends, there is true value in pair programming. The unstructured spread of not just knowledge, but how to think about programming.

The lack of true apprenticeship, fellowship, mentorship is an incredible disservice to our industry. The number of people who all need to rediscover the same lessons the hard way wastes so much programmer capital.

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

#190

Post by manmal »

infogulch wrote: post #174
manmal wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel like there's a difference with software though. Maybe not in degree, but in the constant factor. With e.g. metalworking, you can transfer the knowledge but training takes time. And building a new implementation of that knowledge takes time too. But in software the knowledge and implementation is transferred effectively instantly . You can nab software off the internet (transfer knowledge) and start running it…

Sure, but is this not the same as buying a hammer/fertilizer/metal press and using it for your own means? That's a quasi-instantaneous acquisition of the result of hundreds of thousands of years of innovation.
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