When will this 10x meme finally die?
When employers stop wanting them.
Things 10x People Do
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Things 10x People Do
#12Re: Things 10x People Do
#13It is very rare to get 10x recognition on legacy systems, in contrast to what this article states.
Re: Things 10x People Do
#14I'm skeptical of 10x - I buy into 5x.
Biggest one for me is people. If you can recruit, retain, motivate a team - you are going to have an impact. After 20 hires or so that impact is potentially significantly higher than someone who is not as active or gets bogged down.
You also start to get a good network of contractors / partners who trust you / that you will deliver / that will engage with you much more readily even when they aren't taking on other clients or work or whatever. This has a further ripple effect.
Just a view from the sidelines.
Re: Things 10x People Do
#15This reads a lot like Hamming's talk You and Your Research applied to programming. It's the last lecture in a wonderful 31-lecture course, about maths, computers, physics, technology, illustrated through Hamming's life.
He'd spend his lunch hours chatting with people at Bell Labs, asking them if they were working on the most important problems in their field, and if not, why not?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLUeG2W-NLl...
Re: Things 10x People Do
#16I have worked with "10x programmers", who have become "10x" by becoming specialists in their domain. I have also worked with people who are "10x programmers" who have a natural affinity solving problems using programming languages.
However the issue is telling these people apart, from "10x programmers" who appear to be "10x", but achieve this by cutting corners, creating technical debt, and not writing basic documentation.
I've seen sometimes how contractors have built up a reputation as "10x programmers", as they are, by nature, able to join and leave a company in a short period of time, which can allow them to mask the fact that their work is not maintainable.
It is not until later, that other technical permanent staff find out that their work was not actually "10x", however this doesn't bubble up to management.
Management then see permanent staff complaining about the code being difficult to work with, and wonder why they're not like the "10x" contractor.
Re: Things 10x People Do
#17I would add one thing: Understanding and controlling complexity.
When you have multiple systems, you can isolate interactions between them or not.
If you do not isolate complexity, the number of possibilities grows exponentially or factorially. People make the mistake all the time because exponential or factorial behavior grows very slowly at first, factorial of 3 or 4 is very small.
When you are inside an exponential curve you don't see the exponential, you see complexity growing like a line, it looks like linear behavior around the local point you are.
So people start small with very basic things and they start adding features and complexity to it. They improve their understanding of the problem, get better at solving the problem and become optimistic, the perceived difficulty or effort goes down, until they don't know how, but the problem has become intractable and a nightmare to deal with.
Now they will ask for refactoring or restarting from scratch, but without deep knowledge about complexity they will repeat the same mistakes again.
For those people to watch someone that understands complexity is going to be traumatic. They will consider their success either magic or luck or both. It doesn't look that they make anything different, but the magicians get things done and they can't.
Re: Things 10x People Do
#18Talking about "being a 10x" or writing/reading blogs about "what 10xers do" is the programmers' counterpart to "alpha-male" content for gym-bros
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