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1x Programming

tim.mcnamara.nz

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Re: 1x Programming

#101

Post by sokoloff »

ratww wrote: post #81
Aperocky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10x is a really bad term, it tries to quantify a difference without a baseline. The difference isn't in quantity, but imo rather in mentality. Relentlessly automating repeatable tasks can net 100x or 2x or 0.5x depending on context, but something that don't happen often enough.

> 10x is a really bad term, it tries to quantify a difference without a baseline. I believe this is incorrect. The baseline (or 1x) is the lowest-performing member of the team. At least that's how I learned the term.

The lowest performing member of your team could be negative. Or they could be twice as good as the lowest performing person on some other team, or they could be above the industry average, meaning a 10x programmer becomes a 5x or 20x when the team changes.

I’ve always internalized as a “typical, competent programmer” rather than team-specific anything (Peopleware’s definition notwithstanding).

Re: 1x Programming

#102

Post by cryptonector »

duxup wrote: post #12

Way back when I first saw the 10x engineer proclamations I actually thought they were … a joke. Like a meme or something. They described a lot of anti social and strait up toxic behavior and seemed to glorify it. It was absurd. It seemed like the kind of behavior that would all but ensure someone thinks they’re so much more productive than everyone else, and would prevent them from ever seeing that they aren’t. I was…

I know one 10x engineer. He doesn't work 10x harder. He's just wired to be very productive.

Re: 1x Programming

#103

Post by ravedave5 »

chrisweekly wrote: post #65
dsr_ wrote: post #28

In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister write: Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1. Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer. Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the other half by more than 2:1. What nearly everyone who has read that remembers is the following: The best people outperform the average by 10x. Spot a difference?

Tangent: apparently contra DeMarco and Lister, I'd argue that "the worst" are often outright detrimental to a team or project. Which in turn makes me question the "math".

I'll never forget having a negatively productive programmer on my team. If he spent an hour on a PR it would take 1.5+ hours of work to get the PR into shape to merge by other people because it took so much explaining for this guy. It was usually better to just scrap his code and start over. If code of his did slip through reviews often times there would be production defects that would then take more time to solve (tracking down the issue, figuring out where the code was, overhead of service tickets etc) than the original implementation. Just totally wild, he had somehow survived years in the org being shipped from team to team and being a nice pleasant guy to be around. How does one calculate the productiveness of someone on a team compared to that?

Re: 1x Programming

#104

Post by sokoloff »

jt2190 wrote: post #22
Msw242 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a small team (8 devs) and we've focused a ton of energy on developer experience and ergonomics to reduce the cost of contribution and code reviews, and facilitate interaction with other stakeholders. I'm confident at this point that we've doubled productivity, which would make our "Head of" a 10x engineer :)

> Doubled productivity… 10x… Since we’re putting numbers on things, how did we go from 2x to 10x?

Doubling is 10x in base 2.

Re: 1x Programming

#105

Post by torginus »

cracrecry wrote: post #43
angarg12 wrote: post #25

I praise 1x programmers, but for reasons that might go against the grain in HN. I'm from Spain so our working ethic is different from the Anglo-Saxon world. "Work to live, don't live to work" as the saying goes. My principles for a 1x programmer: * Work is a means to an end. A job should support the lifestyle you want to achieve, not be an end on itself. * 9-to-5 is a perfectly reasonable schedule. Fiercely protects…

The principle behind being a 10x programmer is not working more, but working less and using tools that multiply you. The 10x dominates the tools ( and techniques and people and capital) that multiply her. If you have a car you can easily and consistently go 10x faster that walking pace. The same applies for your job. Working on a given company, with access to capital and people and tools can multiply you.

10x can come from many different places, a few examples:

- Person A gets assigned a bug, that there is a memory leak in the library, they are familiar with the code, they open up the profiler, see that there's an excess of Object X, they look for all the allocations, and see that it's not freed in one of 3 places. Whereas Person B does not really have a really good grasp on how either a library or the profiling tools work and mulls around, perhaps has to ask for help, and takes a lot more time.

- A is confronted with an algorithmic challenge, they figure out an elegant solution in 1 hour, they think it through really well, the solution is flawless the first time. B takes more time, say 2x, and still are not sure in the solution. They implement it nevertheless, and pass it onto QA, who finds bugs, and the issue needs to be reconstructed, the code rewritten and retested. These things compound and add up.

- Writing tools instead of doing things manually as others have pointed out

- Using a library meant to solve a problem instead of rolling your own

All these things are based on concrete experiences that happened to people around me.

Re: 1x Programming

#106

Post by manmal »

mywittyname wrote: post #76
manmal wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really a thing, secretly working more to give the appearance of higher output, while not even getting paid for it? Given the little time we have on this planet, this sounds like a suboptimal use of it.

Crunch times are a thing in a lot of jobs.

Yes I‘ve had my fill of crunch times. But I always made my clients aware if they weren’t, and I usually earned decent money as a result.

Re: 1x Programming

#107

Post by [deleted] »

ratww wrote: post #71
manmal wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really a thing, secretly working more to give the appearance of higher output, while not even getting paid for it? Given the little time we have on this planet, this sounds like a suboptimal use of it.

It definitely is. It happens with over-achievers but it also happens very frequently with under-achievers. In jobs where people have quotas it is very visible, seeing people scrambling to finish it all by the end of the month, to the detriment of their free time. But this is also the "secret" of some over-achievers. It's absolutely unhealthy.

[deleted]

Re: 1x Programming

#108

Post by twobitshifter »

raz32dust wrote: post #85

If by 10x, you mean engineers that add 10x more value compared to an average engineer in the team, then from working 10+ years in the industry, it is abundantly clear to me that 10x programmers exist, and a good team is likely to have 5-10% of those. However, these engineers are rare, and when you do find them, they are not perfect. They might have flaws in other areas - communication and teamwork is a common one. Mo…

I somewhat agree, lurking in this post is a strawman of a 10x programmer, who demonstrates negative qualities, but that might not be who a 10x programmer really is, or someone else’s own definition of a 10x programmer.

I still bookmarked the post because after stripping away the negative 10x stuff there is good material on how to be a quality team member.

Re: 1x Programming

#109

Post by torginus »

duxup wrote: post #12

Way back when I first saw the 10x engineer proclamations I actually thought they were … a joke. Like a meme or something. They described a lot of anti social and strait up toxic behavior and seemed to glorify it. It was absurd. It seemed like the kind of behavior that would all but ensure someone thinks they’re so much more productive than everyone else, and would prevent them from ever seeing that they aren’t. I was…

Unfortunately (or fortunately) there certainly are 10x engineers, and if they happen to be your coworkers, that's the most amazing thing in life. It's the difference between handing a task over to someone, and finding next day that it's done in amazing quality and finding they haven't made any progress at all.

And in my experience, these people usually are not braggarts or have huge egos, they are just really good at solving problems expediently.

Some make a great career out of it, many get stuck in the trenches.

Re: 1x Programming

#110

Post by [deleted] »

ratww wrote: post #73
unwind wrote: post #11

Has anyone published some kind of quantified, "hard" comparison/survey about the relative productivity of programmers? It would be very interesting with a clean "we asked n programmers to solve this"-type problem, and then being able to compare the solutions. Uh, did I just sound like I wanted to work in recruiting? #fail

At several companies I worked for, by using Scrum Points, it was always visible that the most experienced devs were able to regularly deliver a multiple (definitely around 10x) more points than interns and about 2x more than the average dev. Not a perfect metric by any means, of course, but definitely quantifiable and observable. Metrics for LOC and commits/PRs made also followed a similar pattern. Again, not perfect…

[deleted]
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