Programming is terrible – Lessons learned from a life wasted (2013) [video]

I dunno, he sounds more like a 5x engineer to me!

I think it's really just unique to the Bay Area, and it's wacked out culture it's been cultivating that focuses on the bang-bang-bang go-go-go 100x multiple return on dollars.

I've been an engineer for over a decade, and the first time I heard the term "10x" was 6 months ago when a product manager referred to me a "10x engineer" during a conference call.

It's absurd.

- Fewer managers - a group of 10 will probably require a programming lead who spends some fraction of their time not coding.

- One tenth the amount of office space and hardware.

- Only paying for one person's health insurance instead of ten peoples'.

- Vastly reduced communications overhead - a team of 10 people is going to spend a lot of time communicating with each other to insure that everyone is doing what they need to be doing.

So I'm guessing you'll come out ahead even if you do pay ten times more for ten times the productivity. But companies rarely even pay twice as much for a developer who is exceptionally productive.

The downside of having one person doing the work of ten is that it's a disaster when the person decides to quit - it's the equivalent of a whole team of people simultaneously quitting.

In software development, I think that 10x number is also a lower bound if anything. Bad developers are everywhere, churning out volumes of terrible, pointless, code. In a code review a while back for a client, I made an offhanded comment about a minor thing like "make sure this list is sorted and deduped". The code owner then started "discussing" that and estimated it'd take about 2 hours. I was stunned and added the code ".Distinct().OrderBy(...)" right there in the review. I'm at a loss at how to explain that kind of difference, and that's on a micro-scale.

At the other end, I've seen projects/companies go down colossally wrong paths because they simply couldn't understand basic algorithmic complexity. So, say, I dunno, a week or two to do it right, versus a year spent chasing down fake paths? That doesn't even measure the business impact of floundering around for a year while impacting customers.

Focusing on "coding 10x faster" is simply misleading. Like measuring an author based on how fast they can type.

It's a bad myth that "speed" has anything to do with the 10x or 100x programmer. The thing that sets great programmers apart is their ability to instinctively and intuitively design elegant and correct solutions to a given problem while introducing minimal bugs. A great programmer whose code will stand the test of time without needing a total rewrite 6 months later and without a horrendous maintenance and complexity overhead could write their code at 10 words a minute and still be worth their weight in gold.

Personally I think "great" programmers are really just "good" programmers - those that understand the problem domain, have expertise in their tools and know how to minimize complexity - this should not be some white albatross but rather a level we should all aspire too. I think it is more useful to identify bad programmers - those that rage in like a bull in a china shop, adding layers of complexity and abstraction to cover up their lack of knowledge and expertise, who flippantly choose bad designs for a given problem because they believe in some universal "right way" and spend half their time on premature optimizations before their buggy product is even in a testable state.

I have come across numerous bad programmers in my time, and if they were nipped in the bud early before they could leave reams of damage in their wake, I can testify to many man-months in effort rectifying their mistakes.