You're Not a 10x Programmer

I am absolutely 10x compared to myself at an earlier stage in my career, at which point I was still perfectly hirable and productive.

There are certainly those who are 10xers compared to me today, especially those active in domains I have less experience in.

My main issue with the notion of 10x programmers is this:

- A 1 meter stick is 10x longer than 10 cm stick.

- A 10 years old car is 10x older than a 1 year old car.

- A $5000 laptop is 10x as expensive as a $500 one.

These are all clear and measurable quantities, representing well-defined properties.

How do we measure the difference between a 1x and a 10x programmer? All measurements that were tried in the past are either unrepresentative and easy to game (lines of code, number of commits...), or too vague or depending on interpretation to be useful for any objective measurement (productivity? languages learned? years of experience? development velocity?...)

Until we can find (eve we ever can) a clear, representative and objectively measurable value that we can use to rank programmers, any idea of 10x will not mean anything - or, to be precise, will mean what each of us wants it to mean.

Possibly depends on your age. When I first encountered averages at school, I was taught there were three most commonly used (mean, median and mode) and their various failings, and we never used the term "average" on its own if we meant a specific kind of average. The median was as much an average as the mean.

At some point in the last couple of decades, it seems that "average" took on one specific meaning (no pun intended).

To continue the olympic metaphor, those medals are handed out for very specific subsets of skills, not even just runner vs swimmer, but specific distances, specific techniques or variants.

While 'olympic-level athlete' contains some level of meaning to me, I feel it is similarly vague enough that you wouldn't know whether a random athlete would be better than average at a random olympic sport. There's probably some correlation, but e.g. a googled list of 10 weirdest olympic events ever claims to include 'poodle shearing', 'solo synchronized swimming', 'horse long jump' as well as the more 'normal' sports that were recently introduced such as 'skateboarding', 'surfing', 'sports climbing'. Would a 10x poodleshearer be a 10x surfer? I'm not even sure that would hold true between skateboarding and surfing which are vaguely related in my mind (as someone who can do neither).

I feel 'programming' is a similarly wide field, and so it's obvious that e.g. a really good COBOL mainframe banking programmer, might struggle with generative audio-visual art and vice versa.

So I guess for me, the difficulty with this 10x programmer concept, is how do you differentiate the experience and the training from the 'raw genius' which is what i feel people are getting at when they use this concept. And that's without even getting into motivation and interest and impact on others (e.g. mentoring teams, supporting others) and business impact.

In general the whole concept seems so undefined that people are all projecting their own things onto it. Which is great for clickbaity blog headlines, but what is the actual take -away knowledge I am supposed to gain from this concept?

That my potential is limited by my genes, my industriousness, my time invested, my focus on one niche? That I should hire people that have iq or focus or domain knowledge or ..? That I should construct teams or businesses around a small number of people that specialize, or i should hire two different ranks of programmers, the 10x and the 1x and use them differently?

Even after seeing some programmers like bellard and DJB achive 100x of that of a normal programmer, random web developers on hacker news and reddit continue doing mental gymnastics to prove all programmers are equal, maybe doing webshit in react is, after all, above science.