It's an interesting point: if some programmers are x10 productive, shouldn't there be programmer-organizations that are x10 productive? Some possible explanations: - an organization's productivity has many other factors that influence its productivity - optimizing part doesn't necessarily translate into the same optimization of the whole. Other factors, such as business skills (e.g. obtaining specifications, negotiat…
Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”
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Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”
#42I know physicists/programmers who are not only 10x faster in getting anything done, but can do in a day what most programmers never achieve in a career. You'd better believe there are massive differences in productivity -- or your business will be inevitably outcompeted, and fail.
Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are discussing productivity in the corporate bureaucracy, not efficacy and fame. And do you have any evidence that the success of those projects were due to those persons rather than the environment in which the projects were developed and supported? And before you reply, no efficacy is not productivity unless you are going to credit the original microsoft windows developers as productive as well.
Are you claiming that the people who built Windows were not productive?
Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it depends on who you've met. In the area of debugging games, I have been EASILY 10x more productive than the developers I was supporting in finding bugs in their code. In fact, you could say infinitely more productive, because they would typically spend hours or days trying to find the bug, and the only reason I'd ever see it is that they failed to find it. I was the architect of the underlying game engine u…
Are these people actually worse, or are you simply benefiting by supplying "a pair of fresh eyes" on the problem?
As a point of reference: A lot of people sought out -- and praised -- advice I gave in the SDK support forums. I would typically figure out what their problem was without seeing any code. Many attributed the popularity of the SDK I was supporting to the fact that I was supporting it, and as the SDK became irrelevant about 3 months after I resigned from the company, there may have been something to that.
Another thought: A lot of the teams I was supporting had multiple developers, so presumably had already shown the problems to other "fresh eyes."
I'm certainly capable of getting stuck looking at a problem wrong, and I have benefited from talking to other developers. For me the benefit is typically because I've gone down the wrong design path. It's been a LONG time since I couldn't debug my own code faster than anyone else.
When you're working on a design, sometimes being good isn't an advantage; you can see a solution to a problem, and you work to solve it that way, but it turns out there's a much simpler solution to the same problem. If I weren't as confident of a programmer I might work harder to find a simpler solution. At the same time you can spend hours of time trying to come up with the perfect design that would be better spent just coding, so it's a hard balance to always get right. And for problems that really need a complex solution, well, the average programmer may decide that they can't be solved.
I've typically (with one painful exception where the match to my skills wasn't ideal) been the developer that everyone comes to for advice everywhere I've worked. I've known a lot of excellent developers easily at my skill level or beyond, and yet MOST professional developers I know are nowhere even close, and even among those I consider competent I feel like 10x may be insufficient to describe the real difference.
Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”
#45Meh, all of these debates about "the mythical 10x programmer" are missing an important point: You can't just lump all programmers into one batch in the first place. That is, I posit that there are programmers who are better at certain things, or better in certain domains, or better at certain times of day, or even better during certain phases of the moon. Whatever. Maybe one guy is a goddamn genius when it comes to w…
I believe in the "10x programmer" phenomenon.. In my experience, the best programmers seem to quickly become very good at whatever development task they put their minds to.
Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”
#46Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really, these are anecdotes, not evidence. And I think he chose his words carefully, he said median , not average . Of course - to paraphrase Greg Wilson[1] - if one were to go further and compare the "best" driver to the "worst" driver, the difference would be to the power of infinity because the worst driver is dead . The comparison is not useful. I'd love to see some studies on this sort of stuff though. [1] "Greg…
Great video. Do you know if the book that he mentioned, originally to be called Beautiful Evidence, but that he had to change the name, was published? By which name?