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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)

#221

Post by flukus »

poikniok wrote: post #169
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…

"scrum" I found your issue. I don't think 10x developers work in places that do "scrum", as if they are some low skill assembly line worker. You think Jeff Dean does "scrum"?

So 10x programmers don't work anywhere with a somewhat objective performance metric? I don't think that's a coincidence.

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

#222

Post by DougWebb »

dahart wrote: post #210
DougWebb wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're capable of both pumping out CRUD pages and adding features to a compiler, then you may be a 10x developer. I consider myself to be a 10x developer, but I'm not 10x all of the time for all tasks. Things that set me apart are the quality of my code vs other developer's code for a given amount of development time, the higher probability of my code being bug-free or nearly so before I've even run it, my skill a…

> If you're capable of both pumping out CRUD pages and adding features to a compiler, then you may be a 10x developer. This is a valuable point; many of the most productive people I know are breadth first not depth first. Being able to glue disparate systems together without having to stop and iterate with someone else saves a ton of time. > Things that set me apart are... the higher probability of my code being bug-…

"higher probability" doesn't mean "always". Of course I test my code thoroughly before committing it. But the fact is that my code tends to be really close to done before I've even run it.

I'll admit that's sort of a technicality, though. I've been programming for a long time, most of my career without anything more sophisticated than a text editor. I've taught myself to be pretty good at running code in my head, even fairly complex code. So what I'm really doing while I'm writing code is running it in my head as I write it, and finding the unhandled edge cases and other bugs while I'm doing it. I'm also compiling the code (if applicable) which finds other bugs. So, by the time I run the code for real, most of the bugs are gone. This is all a natural part of the act of coding for me, so I see it as coding rather than running/debugging. (I often debug in my head too; handy when you know roughly where a problem is but can't reproduce it.)

I agree completely with your last paragraph; that all helps to be able to hold the execution state in your mind while you're reading through the code.

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

#223

Post by DougWebb »

metaphorm wrote: post #207
DougWebb wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're capable of both pumping out CRUD pages and adding features to a compiler, then you may be a 10x developer. I consider myself to be a 10x developer, but I'm not 10x all of the time for all tasks. Things that set me apart are the quality of my code vs other developer's code for a given amount of development time, the higher probability of my code being bug-free or nearly so before I've even run it, my skill a…

you realize that the tests are primarily for other developers (on your team, in the future) and not yourself, right?

That's highly dependent on the team, the code, and the tests. For my work, most of the time, comments in the well-structured code are much more likely to still be useful and valid to me and my team over time than a test suite that won't get maintained.

In the past six years, I only worked on one project that justified an extensive test suite. It was a scheduling system for a large machine shop, which allocated multi-step manufacturing tasks across a suite of metal-working machines for dozens of concurrent jobs, while taking into account available machinists, working hours, breaks, vacations, and scheduled maintenance downtimes for each machine. Testing the algorithms for that required setting up a variety of consistent starting conditions, running the scheduler, injecting changes to existing jobs and inserting new jobs at certain times, and making sure that the resulting scheduling decisions were acceptable to the experts who'd been doing the schedules manually and to the machinists.

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

#224

Post by psyc »

redblacktree wrote: post #217
psyc wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences

This comment would be a lot more useful if you elucidated how you believe the parent poster committed this fallacy.

The comment that I did make is pretty useful. Why can't you be satisfied with it?

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

#225

Post by acdha »

flukus wrote: post #219
acdha wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Given how many clients that company had, the main conclusion I draw is that as an industry focusing on helping the .1x people improve is more likely to make a noticeable difference than chasing the other end of the spectrum. Do you think that's possible? More often than not the .1x people don't seem to care either.

Not always but I do think there are organizational contributing factors: some people will see inefficiency and try to do something about it but others might just roll up their sleeves and do what they're told (maybe after unsuccessfully trying to change things a few times). That's the group I think could be helped given changes in support & incentives.

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

#226

Post by marcosdumay »

Nomentatus wrote: post #193
marcosdumay wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An order of magnitude of what?

See other replies vs measurement - and remember all the large software projects that never get deployed, becoming outright failures. Can you really conclude that they were problems nobody on earth could have solved?

I don't disagree you will see orders of magnitude differences between people by some measurement.

The problem is that nobody defending it is specifying what measurement will yeld those orders of magnitude difference, and what is its relevance. Claiming a difference without telling in what dimension is an empty claim, and that is exactly the problem with the 10x developer idea.

(By the way, yes, there are plenty of problems nobody on Earth could ever solve. That doesn't follow from the fact that easier projects fail, but it's not false either.)

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

#228

Post by jdlshore »

Nomentatus wrote: post #206
deathanatos wrote: post #62

These things make my blood boil. I'm going to allow the assumption that 10x programmers even exist. First, it's elitist. This isn't a professional athletics team, this is the workplace focused on engineering. Most places are not chock-full of the 10x'ers; I need to depend on other people to do things for me, and them on me; not all of us are 10x'ers, and it behooves all of us to work as a team . The 10x discussion di…

Controlled experiments are in order. The article cites "Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and McGarry 1989, Boehm et al 2000" I'm sorry the links don't work, but that still sounds like a traceable bibliography to me. I just tested Google on one study, and found it (paywalled I assume) - "A summary of software measurement experiences in the…

Lauren Bossavit has taken the trouble to trace those citations. His book about his search for the truth behind those claims (and several other common software engineering beliefs) is well worth reading:

https://leanpub.com/leprechauns

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

#229

Post by crdoconnor »

Bartweiss wrote: post #123
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 companie…

A lot of "developer brilliance" is simply avoiding the inevitable slowdown that happens when projects mire themselves in technical debt.

I've worked on plenty of projects where two smart developers would have massively outperformed the 10-12 mediocre and highly risk-averse developers working on the shitty (gradually getting shittier) code base over a period of 6 months.

For greenfield I don't think 10x productivity is likely though. If you're testing an idea you might throw away, cheap and cheerful will do.

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

#230

Post by tonyedgecombe »

crdoconnor wrote: post #229
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…

A lot of "developer brilliance" is simply avoiding the inevitable slowdown that happens when projects mire themselves in technical debt. I've worked on plenty of projects where two smart developers would have massively outperformed the 10-12 mediocre and highly risk-averse developers working on the shitty (gradually getting shittier) code base over a period of 6 months. For greenfield I don't think 10x productivity i…

On many of the projects I worked on there were two smart developers doing all the work and 10-12 mediocre developers doing almost nothing.
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