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There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

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Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#81

Post by kamaal »

nostrademons wrote: post #75
DannyBee wrote: post #4

There is no offer of proof for the claim that there are no 10x developers past claiming "they've not seen it in practice" I have seen them with my own eyes. They are in fact, able to do things 10x faster than others. There are not a huge number of them, but they exist. At Google, folks like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are easily 10x more productive than "the baseline proficient engineer". Any proficient engineer wh…

For those who work inside Google, it's well worth it to look at Jeff & Sanjay's commit history and code review dashboard. They aren't actually all that much more productive in terms of code written than a decent SWE3 who knows his codebase. The reason they have a reputation as rockstars is that they can apply this productivity to things that really matter; they're able to pick out the really important parts of the pr…

What I learn from this is, they key to being a 10x developer is to work on problems that have 10x impact and not necessarily writing 10x more code.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#82

Post by kinleyd »

clubhi wrote: post #2

I think there are 10x developers because the vast majority are 1x.

I'm of the same view.

I think there is some fuzzy logic going on here: If the majority are 1/10 developers (as the op asserts) and thus form the baseline x, aren't the 1/1 developers by definition 10x developers?

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#83

Post by zeeg »

If there are 1/10 developers, there are, in fact 10x developers.

Guys, math and stuff.

In all seriousness, there's a lot of things being done in the productivity and quality spaces to try and mine data to measure things. I recently joined tenXer (.com) which is trying to both drive productivity measurements as well as quality indicators.

We by no means have any answers, but I think things have evolved a lot in the recent years to where bringing real measurements is becoming a possibility.

I think the important thing here is to realize that measuring people is not solely for someone to manage you differently. You can't succeed in something if you don't have a reasonable success metric, and data makes it far easier to capture those.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#84

Post by sliverstorm »

reeses wrote: post #76
sliverstorm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can believe 10x. Though, when people start throwing around numbers like, "A great developer is literally 1,000x more productive than an average developer!" I raise an eyebrow.

Depending on what you mean by the average developer, 1000x is plausible. If you think in terms of reliability, it's the difference between a four nines engineer and a one nine. That guy who pushes untested code that brings the site down for a day vs. the woman who has to roll back her code once in five years because she made a fencepost error is an example of how such variances in developer "productivity" can be meas…

I'm skeptical that any engineer can independently be responsible for four nines. HA is a big-picture deal. One engineer can break it, but one engineer can't make it.

Put differently, a good HA organization does not need 1000x engineers- a good system ensures even garden variety engineers will deliver.

There are lenses through which you can look and say "Engineer A was 1000x as productive as Engineer B", but those lenses are things like leveraged work, which is not what people are thinking of when they talk about "rockstar programmers".

When you say someone is 1000x as productive, that means that they sit down and do 3 years of work in 8 hours. (Unless the average developer contributes negative net productivity)

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#85

Post by nostrademons »

kamaal wrote: post #81
nostrademons wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who work inside Google, it's well worth it to look at Jeff & Sanjay's commit history and code review dashboard. They aren't actually all that much more productive in terms of code written than a decent SWE3 who knows his codebase. The reason they have a reputation as rockstars is that they can apply this productivity to things that really matter; they're able to pick out the really important parts of the pr…

What I learn from this is, they key to being a 10x developer is to work on problems that have 10x impact and not necessarily writing 10x more code.

That's the right lesson. The difference is actually even more stark than that: if you extend it out to picking the right project in the right company in the right industry, there're positions where you can be easily 1000x more productive. Project selection probably determines more of your productivity than almost any day-to-day coding decision.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#86

Post by reefab »

superdude wrote: post #13

I guess I don't get it. This Ph.D candidate was recommended by the previous CTO and was the one spearheading the framework transition...and then was fired after 2 weeks? But junior devs at the previous firm were given months to get up to speed?

I just had that happen at my company.

New Dev hired by the CEO without input from anyone else. She was not bad, but terribly sloooooooooooooooow. She indeed took 10x longer to do common tasks compared to other devs.

It's not that she wasn't smart or reticent to learn new things, just that her way of working through problems was incredibly long winded for some reason.

It's not something that you can easily re-train someone to fix, it's a fundamental problem and that combined with other issues made us let her go.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#87

Post by bastijn »

joelhooks wrote: post #62
kamaal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agile is the current day water fall model. I mean in spirit on in factual procedures. >>I could have easily been 10x more productive if I didn't have to endure four hour sprint planning meetings I completely understand this feeling. The problem is so plain and simple. There are teams that win because of heroics, they achieve something big. Those management types who lack the chops to be heroes simply try to turn hero…

Somebody should let them know that unit tests are for us, not them.

someone should tell everybody that it is not us or them, but we.

unit test help us but not them? How can that be true if they pay your salary. If tests make you more efficient, so becomes the/their team (we/them as you please). In the end even the customer is influenced by good unit tests, or any other improvement for you. Bottom line: stop thinking us vs them, think we.

p.s. Not a manager, I am a programmer like you.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#88

Post by shubhamjain »

Isn't it obvious that people who use dual monitors, take time to set up projects, one step builds, thonl before coding, think about their work be more productive then who don't. What I feel is productivoty isn't magical which a programmer has, it is driven by how much obsessed the programmer is in increasing it ( too much obsession wont be great though ).

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#89

Post by shubhamjain »

Isn't it obvious that people who use dual monitors, take time to set up projects, one step builds, thonl before coding, think about their work be more productive then who don't. What I feel is productivoty isn't magical which a programmer has, it is driven by how much obsessed the programmer is in increasing it ( too much obsession wont be great though ).

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#90

Post by clubhi »

kinleyd wrote: post #82
clubhi wrote: post #2

I think there are 10x developers because the vast majority are 1x.

I'm of the same view. I think there is some fuzzy logic going on here: If the majority are 1/10 developers (as the op asserts) and thus form the baseline x, aren't the 1/1 developers by definition 10x developers?

haha exactly... It doesn't matter at what number you set as the baseline. We would say a developer's productivity is an average (mode perhaps) of all developers' productivity. There are a percentage of them that are 10x more productive.

Its much worse than that in my experience. Some people won't be able to jump over hurdles no matter how hard they try. I'm like that for making a website look good (pre-boostrap). I'd eff around an entire week on swapping colors and changing pixels sizes.

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