161–170 of 356 posts
Implicitly, he invites readers to re-evaluate their experiences.
To me, this rings true for most mundane organizations (not id software).
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Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? How about 10 minutes? There _are_ gaps between skill levels, but from personal experience, no one is substantially worse or better. We are after all just flesh and bone...
The average marathon run time is about 4.5 hours. The world record marathon run time is 2 hours. Most people who run cannot even complete a marathon. Then there are ultramarathons.
and then there's Mauro Prosperi
This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at…
The only reason DOOM was finished in 1997 was because John Carmack recognized himself as the 10x developer and started living in-office until the game was finished. Obviously it's important to not let silly titles distract you, but stepping up to the plate like this is how organizations get stuff done .
This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at…
Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? How about 10 minutes? There _are_ gaps between skill levels, but from personal experience, no one is substantially worse or better. We are after all just flesh and bone...
When you talk about a 10x programmer, you don't expect their program to run 10x as fast. You expect 10x the results.
A 10x marathoner could post the regular marathoners best times 10x as frequently throughout the year easily. His training runs would destroy regular runners PR's. No amount of work by the regular guy would allow him to produce a single instance of comparable performance.
This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at…
I'm a 10x developer if we count non developers. I am not if we could people who work as developers. Likewise there are expert marathon runners who are 10X, or more, than the average human. But there are not marathon runners who run 10x faster than other professional marathon runners.
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Is it really that 10x performers exist, or that 0.4x performers are abundant so 2x performers look like 10x performers? I guess what I'm asking is if there is any actual data on this so we can look at actual statistics or if it is all just a meaningless blogspam topic.
Don’t forget that we have -x performers. There are some programmers who are worse than nothing happening. So a 10x looks better by working accords the averages of all the 1x, -1x, etc.
That article starts out with...
> We've known since the early sixties, but have never come to grips with the implications that there are net negative producing programmers (NNPPs) on almost all projects, who insert enough spoilage to exceed the value of their production. So, it is important to make the bold statement: Taking a poor performer off the team can often be more productive than adding a good one. [6, p. 208] Although important, it is difficult to deal with the NNPP. Most development managers do not handle negative aspects of their programming staff well. This paper discusses how to recognize NNPPs, and remedial actions necessary for project success.
> Researchers have found between a low of 5 to 1 to a high of 100 to 1 ratios in programmer performance. This means that programmers at the same level, with similar backgrounds and comparable salaries, might take 1 to 100 weeks to complete the same tasks. [21, p. 8]
Source 21 is: Shneiderman, Ben Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1980)
https://www.amazon.com/Software-psychology-computer-informat...
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Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? How about 10 minutes? There _are_ gaps between skill levels, but from personal experience, no one is substantially worse or better. We are after all just flesh and bone...
> Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? That’s the wrong analogy because marathon runners are already the 10x-ers of movement. The average person could cover the distance of a marathon, but it would take them many days of walking and resting. A marathon runner can finish a marathon in around 5 hours. That’s an order of magnitude faster than an average person, so yes, they are 10X-ers. Most pe…
The other big problem here is that you're talking about a complex skill but trying to reduce it to a single number. Tellingly, most of the 10x developer examples cited are cases where they know exactly what they want to do and have near-complete control over it, which isn't exactly how most developers work. It's really hard to quantify things like teamwork or the ability to distill what people need from what they say they need, and those are core skills for most of us in a way that optimizing a 3D engine is not.
1. I've done marathon length _hikes_ in far less than a single day, and I'm far from a hard-core athlete.
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“Adding people to a late project makes it later”. Equally, replacing high performers with multiple people wouldn't work most of the time.
Are we sure they're not actually the exact same problem? Hypothesis: the "10x" developer does not actually have 10x the output of a single average developer, but rather the same output as 10 average developers working together (and having much of their productivity eaten up by coordination overhead).
One of the aspects of having a chief programmer (and there's another HN article making the rounds on heroes for projects) is that they're able to conceptualize/structure/design an entire application or module.
A chief programmer, doing a "this is how we're doing it" and with all the parts in their head and working to that end will have better overall "idea to deploy" performance than someone who is given the task of "do X" and may have to come back to it again to reconcile their implementation of X with the design of the system and its goals.
The way to resolve that is to get everyone who is working on it on the same page for the design... and that takes meetings leading to the issues with adding more people to a project will make it later.
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> It's hard to tell if it's arrogance or reluctance to admit some people are more valuable than others and just allow them to get to a point they prefer to leave than stay. Stating that a developer is worth 10 times what other developers are worth goes way beyond saying that some people are more valuable than others. We're not talking about junior/medior/senior distinctions. We're talking about 10x. The myths. The lo…
MapReduce. Leveraging lower level abstractions incipient in the early Google datacenter (distributed FS, distributed process executor) and providing a simple but expressive programming model for distributed large scale batch computations. A significant amount of effort went into documenting and exemplifying the usage of the programming model for a large number of use-cases. Chosen to serve thousands of use-cases all…
Edit: I just noticed that you said the same yourself. Great minds...