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There are probably also a few 100x engineers, maybe someone like Elon.
They crank out code that is easy to read, easy to understand, works right out of the box, and gives years of trouble-free operation.
Sean Parent is one of those programmers. It's pretty obvious when he describes how he replaced a nightmarish tangle of code that re-invented a simple rotate algorithm.
It's a remarkable talk:
I suggest to flag this as fake news and all future articles intended to devalue young talented programmers who yet are to discover their true market value.
> highly productive developers (10x or otherwise) are problem-solving at a much higher level This is a very important point, but calling these highly productive developers "10x" doesn't really make sense. They are more like "infinity times" compared to the average when it comes to getting a difficult task done, since the average developer would just get stuck and never be able to invent good designs and solve the dif…
Joel Spolsky's "Hitting the high notes" always comes to mind for me when this debate arises.
Can we stop the self hate already? There definitely are 10x musicians, 10x painters, sportsmen and 10x programmers. You know what never exists in 10x form? Burocrats and middle managers who write articles like this one. I suggest to flag this as fake news and all future articles intended to devalue young talented programmers who yet are to discover their true market value.
So, it's not 10x or anything-X even, it's just that, if the stuff that can be uniquely provided by "10x" people is important to you, then you need someone like that. 10 1x developers aren't likely to give you that (except to the extent that you have 10 chances to discover that one of them is actually a 10xer on some dimension).
Can we stop the self hate already? There definitely are 10x musicians, 10x painters, sportsmen and 10x programmers. You know what never exists in 10x form? Burocrats and middle managers who write articles like this one. I suggest to flag this as fake news and all future articles intended to devalue young talented programmers who yet are to discover their true market value.
Oh and also, "finding the 10x engineer" feels like a hotspot to inject hidden bias into recruiting.
The concept of the 10x programmer seems to have been drifted from its original meaning. It isn't that there's a coder that is 10x better than a good coder. It is that a lot of people are really bad at their jobs, and a coder that thinks and learns about problems can be far better than those people. It comes from terrible "corporate drone" software developers in the 80s and 90s - the ones that would takes weeks to dev…
Why wouldn’t there be such thing as a 10x programmer? Is the average programmer so good? There are outliers in every industry. Professional athletes are a clear example — they are often many orders of magnitude better than the average player of their respective sport. There are probably also a few 100x engineers, maybe someone like Elon.