The Making of Software Engineering Myths

> dismantling the 10x claim (writing an entire book about it)

"Leprechauns" is by no means entirely about 10x developers.

In it I also tackle things like the "exponentially increasing cost of bugs" claim, the Cone of Uncertainty, the "software crisis", the successive mythical reconstructions of the Waterfall bogeyman, the limitations of the "empirically based software engineering" movement and specifically the problem of discipline envy.

If it had only been the 10x thing that turned out to be ill-supported I wouldn't have gotten my knickers all atwist. My beef is precisely that when you look closely most of software engineering looks awfully like pseudoscience.

This article is, in a way, Chapter 1 of the next book, in which I'd look beyond "academic" myths, and try to confront a broader picture of how the software community thinks about itself, and how that perpetuates some of the problems we've been bitching about for decades. (And some of these problems turned out to be non-existent; other very real ones barely rate a nod from academia. That is also part of the problem.)

Thanks for the clarification. It seems we disagree less than I thought, and I've deleted my mistaken impression from the root comment.

I may have asked you this before, but do you know of any finding in the research literature that you don't consider pseudoscience? The only one I know of that might come close is research on code size. I've heard that the literature on code inspections is good, but that may just be another myth.

> Of course developing software is a highly abstract, intellectually demanding activity

I don't mean to sound harsh, but "of course" and "it's absurd" aren't much of an argument.

My advice is to dig into this a bit deeper. What do you think makes software "a highly abstract, intellectually demanding activity"? What would the world look like if that were NOT the case, what would it look like if it WERE the case?

How does this claim coexist with that, which has been bandied about for decades, that software programming is on the brink of being automated away?

How does this claim square with sites like the Daily WTF, which provide evidence that many gainfully employed programmers do not, in fact, use their brains very much? With the more or less weekly announcements of "security breaches" caused by people ignoring basic best practice, for instance storing passwords in plain text?

How much mathematical(ish) ability is actually needed to put together a Web page, a bunch of CRUD fields, and some backend database template?

Why is it so easy to get a job writing software even if you have no formal credentials at all? How is it that some people can get these jobs even if all they can do is write a Web page, and that badly?

It's possible that our experiences differ: that for you software has been abstract and demanding. (I can see people who write kernels for a living getting the "of course" reaction.) Whereas I've often rubbed shoulders with the world of "IT programming", with self-taught games programmers and Web programmers and people who turned a half-baked idea and their gift for the gab into multimillion dollar businesses.

Whenever I did my homework and dug into the facts, I found that things that "of course" held true weren't all that obvious. I'm trying to encourage people in the profession to get into that habit.

> as absurd as claiming women are somehow incapable of doing exactly that

Yes, I too see that as a false claim. Do you deny that there are people out there who are in fact making that claim?

Tons of 10x hate in here already. Is there a reason this is such a stumbling block for people? Is there a reason that isn't tinged by sour grapes? I'm like 99% convinced that I've worked with such people and seen what they can do. I'd be willing to buy that it isn't simply the individual, but the individual plus the right circumstances. But I absolutely can't say that I've never seen a single developer write a surprisingly large amount of good code in a surprisingly short amount of time, because I have seen it.

I don't know why anyone down voted this because there's definitely at least some truth here. A lot of times the stereotypical 10x rock stars in an organization are really smart and productive people who ship features and move on to the next feature, leaving maintenance to the people who are left behind. They get the glory, but in many cases (totally anecdotal of course) they did it by taking all sorts of shortcuts and kludging things together in ways that aren't scalable or maintainable.

In this case, the 10x productivity boost comes from incurring technical debt that they personally will never have to deal with. Many organizations need these people in order to actually ship stuff, but their productivity comes at a cost that's paid for later, by other people. Maybe they're 10x up front, but it ends up being more like 1-2x when these costs are taken into account.

I'm more worried about the much more tangible 0.1x (or the feared but very real -1x) engineers, who exist in many organizations.