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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

#91

Post by clubhi »

nhashem wrote: post #22

"x10 developers" are, in fact, proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain. Well, I'd say this is only true for your typical corporate entity, where their products are basically just web applications that represent a state machine using some sort of database store for persistence (which is... basically everything). By the time the company has achieved some size, there's enough proce…

" ask yourself this: are you in an environment where a 10x developer could actually demonstrate 10x productivity?"

I'd buy whatever you were selling if you started off with that line.

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

#92

Post by justinmk »

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…

> 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

That is the same thing as saying that they are, in fact, more productive.

Productivity is improved by one's ability to synthesize technical concepts and experience; to market (internally, amongst peers) one's ideas; to communicate; to convince; to adapt; to select; and to balance all of these tensions.

> They don't actually write more code

The "10x developer" meme was never a claim on LOC. At least I hope not.

> the code they do write gives them more information, which makes them ensure that they write the right code.

That is productivity optimization.

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

#94

Post by benjaminwootton »

moe wrote: post #61
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…

My latest irritation is manager types getting too obsessed with Unit testing, it reminds of XML and the way it was abused. It's a bit of a tangent but I've also observed this. So much that I've started calling it the "cucumber-complex". Once infected the team not only writes excessive unit-tests to validate things like that a method-call to 'foo' does indeed call the method 'foo'. But they also wrap these unit-tests…

I wouldn't be so quick to write off Cucumber et al.

A few benefits:

- Sometimes business users will contribute and use these scripts (admittedly in only some teams and less often than supporters would claim);

- They help with analysis and design as you are forced to question exactly what behaviour you would like to acheive;

- They keep the developer focused on the feature rather than, for instance, building some big fully featured class or library which wont be used;

- They encourage outside in testing so you get good but pragmatic testing for features at each layer of the application;

- They act as a free living documentation on the system;

- They are more lightweight than they initially appear.

I would rather have lots of BDD style tests than the silly tightly coupled unit tests loaded with expectations that you describe erlier in your post.

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

#95

Post by reeses »

sliverstorm wrote: post #84
reeses wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 len…

"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)"

Productivity is value to the organization. If it is an ecommerce entity, Mr. one nine cost the company 1000x in sales vs. Ms. four nines.

Your skepticism is noted. As I've said, sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up.

Would you claim a developer who replaced 1,000 lines of messy, poorly written code with a 10-line implementation of a more efficient algorithm is less productive than the person who wrote the 1,000 line mess?

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

#98

Post by avenger123 »

A lot of this comes down to the company itself.

Let's just put it out there. If you are working for a consulting company (let's just name the big ones - Accenture, IBM Global Services, Fujitsu Consulting, etc..) it is NOT in the best interests of the company for their developers to be a "10x developer" or even a "1x developer".

Usually these companies have set an expectation on how fast development will go. If its big government projects, icebergs might move at a faster pace than development.

Working as an employee or even on contract on some of these projects, you learn pretty quick what the "pace" needs to be. These companies don't make their money by doing the speediest development.

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

#99

Post by sliverstorm »

reeses wrote: post #95
sliverstorm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 len…

"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)" Productivity is value to the organization. If it is an ecommerce entity, Mr. one nine cost the company 1000x in sales vs. Ms. four nines. Your skepticism is noted. As I've said, sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up. Would…

sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up

At which point I guess we get down to what is an average developer. Does the average developer make such big screw-ups that simply not screwing up is 100x increase in performance?

I guess when I think "average", I'm not thinking about what is actually the measured average, but more like "acceptable competency". Never destroys shit, but also never advances the project a month with something clever. The sort of standard grade you would hope your rank-and-file would be made of.

What does lines of code really mean? If the messy code has a lower bug rate and is easier to debug, which is entirely possible if the 10-line solution is painfully elegant, it is the more productive of the two. Remember that old quote about how it takes twice the cleverness to debug code as it does to write it...

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

#100

Post by cynwoody »

nostrademons wrote: post #85
kamaal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure Larry and Sergey would agree.

The what-to-build skill trumps the how-to-build-it skill every time!

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