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Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

antirez.com

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Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#101

Post by pawadu »

kasey_junk wrote: post #89
latch wrote: post #63

I don't understand how anyone can say 10x programmers don't exist. There are programmers who DRAIN value from projects and companies. The most insidious I've dealt with are people who assure everyone their part is going to be done on time, but come the deadline, they have nothing. I am today, a 10x better programmer than I was where I started. In terms of quality, complexity, efficiency, readability, maintainability,…

I don't doubt that 10x programmers exist. What I doubt is that anyone is a 10x programmer all the time. Whether or not someone is contributing 10x output to a project is such a complex number of things both attributable to the person, their environment, life factors, their coworkers etc. I've seen programmers that were dead weight, moved to a different team and begin to flourish. I've seen programmers that on paper w…

a very insightful comment!

Maybe we should discuss the role of the managers in getting everyone closer to their 10x potential instead of talking about this mythical always-10x creature?

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#102

Post by alexandercrohde »

pawadu wrote: post #101
kasey_junk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt that 10x programmers exist. What I doubt is that anyone is a 10x programmer all the time. Whether or not someone is contributing 10x output to a project is such a complex number of things both attributable to the person, their environment, life factors, their coworkers etc. I've seen programmers that were dead weight, moved to a different team and begin to flourish. I've seen programmers that on paper w…

a very insightful comment! Maybe we should discuss the role of the managers in getting everyone closer to their 10x potential instead of talking about this mythical always-10x creature?

I consider the notion that everyone has equal potential to be absurd. And I consider the notion that managers have much influence over an engineer's productivity to be absurd as well, other than potential downward pressure by being over-involved, inappropriate, distracting with meetings.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#103

Post by Insanity »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #42
Insanity wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not unimportant, the quality of said novels. 2 shitty novels a year versus one praised novel every 10 years.

Actually, I think it's the inverse. Most 2/year novelists are professionals, and it shows. Stephen King consistently wrote at about that rate. 6 months full-time is a good amount of time for a professional writer: 1-2 months for writing, and then another year or so of polishing and editing that happens in parallel with other efforts. 10 year novelists are often amateurs. That novel your next door neighbour asked you…

I did not mean to imply that they have to be bad because of a higher frequency. But I am saying that it is possible that they are.

All I wanted to do was point out that quality matters as well, and not draw a correlation between frequency and quality.

(I do agree that 10 years sounds too extreme for a professional writer of course ^^)

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#105

Post by Chris2048 »

sametmax wrote: post #67
struppi wrote: post #13

Everything from the original post sounds reasonable, you should absolutely read it. Just some random thoughts to add to it: * For most of my past clients, the skill / output of their programmers was not the bottleneck, even though they thought so. As long as something is not a bottleneck, there's not point in trying too hard to optimize it (since you can get better ROI somewhere else). * Software is a team effort. Im…

Come on, Antirez is a x10 programmer, he coded one of the most brillant software of the last decade. It's so well done I use it as an example in my trainings, making people compile it to stop being afraid of building from source because I know it never fails and it's so damn simple. And programmer reading anything on his blog, or anything on HN for that matter, is not an average programmer anyway. The simple fact you…

> Come on, Antirez is a x10 programmer, he coded one of the most brillant software..

"x10 programmer" doesn't mean "great programmer", it means specifically "programmer 10x better than average", so simply writing great software isn't enough - the strongest man in the world might still not be 10x as strong as the average man.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#106

Post by latch »

kasey_junk wrote: post #89
latch wrote: post #63

I don't understand how anyone can say 10x programmers don't exist. There are programmers who DRAIN value from projects and companies. The most insidious I've dealt with are people who assure everyone their part is going to be done on time, but come the deadline, they have nothing. I am today, a 10x better programmer than I was where I started. In terms of quality, complexity, efficiency, readability, maintainability,…

I don't doubt that 10x programmers exist. What I doubt is that anyone is a 10x programmer all the time. Whether or not someone is contributing 10x output to a project is such a complex number of things both attributable to the person, their environment, life factors, their coworkers etc. I've seen programmers that were dead weight, moved to a different team and begin to flourish. I've seen programmers that on paper w…

A great comment. Thank you.

I don't think we're saying anything exclusive. From what I've seen, pretending the gap doesn't exist (for whatever reason), is a sure way to make sure things don't improve.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#107

Post by mikulas_florek »

latch wrote: post #63

I don't understand how anyone can say 10x programmers don't exist. There are programmers who DRAIN value from projects and companies. The most insidious I've dealt with are people who assure everyone their part is going to be done on time, but come the deadline, they have nothing. I am today, a 10x better programmer than I was where I started. In terms of quality, complexity, efficiency, readability, maintainability,…

Notch is known to be quite a bad programmer. Or do you consider him to be 1000x better programmer just because he wrote something which earned billions? In that case he's probably 10x better programmer than Carmack

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#108

Post by dsacco »

pawadu wrote: post #85
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also seen negative impact developers. If they did not code, we'd be closer to the finish line than if they did not. Works great if you pair them with a more senior developer who has the chutzpah to make an impact by deleting egregiously bad code. E.g. one of the best I know made a failing project succeed by literally deleting all unit tests (which in that case were not providing value at all).

> I've also seen negative impact developers. If they did not code, we'd be closer to the finish line than if they did not. Code? I know people that have caused big projects to fail by just showing up at the meetings. The amount of damage a -10x idiot can do to a project is just mind boggling. Here is my unsolicited advice to young players: if you end up in a project with a -1x (or worse) guy who is also the darling o…

Care to share a war story about someone ruining a project by showing up to a meeting? That's amazing.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#109

Post by mattmanser »

latch wrote: post #63

I don't understand how anyone can say 10x programmers don't exist. There are programmers who DRAIN value from projects and companies. The most insidious I've dealt with are people who assure everyone their part is going to be done on time, but come the deadline, they have nothing. I am today, a 10x better programmer than I was where I started. In terms of quality, complexity, efficiency, readability, maintainability,…

A 10X programmer is supposed to be 10x the average, not 10x the people who drain value.

I've watched Notch program, and while he knows of lots of game related algos that I don't, he's not a magical snowflake and it'd take me no time at all to find those algos and implement them. There are huge swathes of the code he writes that I'd be comfortable writing at about the same speed.

From experience solving other complex problems in unrelated domains, it might take me 2 or 3 hours of googling, once, for particular problems. The worst ones a day or two. After I've done it once, it's not hard to either remember or find that code and remind myself.

It certainly wouldn't take me 1000s of hours as you seem to think it would.

I don't believe in 10x programmers. I don't agree with many things stated in this article.

What I believe is that most programmers have a complexity ceiling, where if the code goes past a certain level of complexity they are practically useless on that code base. Often they can just deal with bits of it, but try getting them to do a large scale change and they simply can't. They can't reason coherently about their changes. I think both natural talent and experience raises that ceiling, as does time spent on a particular code base (just for that code base).

And that's where I think the 10x myth comes from.

EDIT: I've even seen projects where the original authors couldn't make much more progress with an operational product, I call it 'coding themself into a corner'. They took the project past the point of the complexity that they could personally handle.

Re: Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

#110

Post by yawz »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #102
pawadu wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a very insightful comment! Maybe we should discuss the role of the managers in getting everyone closer to their 10x potential instead of talking about this mythical always-10x creature?

I consider the notion that everyone has equal potential to be absurd. And I consider the notion that managers have much influence over an engineer's productivity to be absurd as well, other than potential downward pressure by being over-involved, inappropriate, distracting with meetings.

We shouldn't underestimate the impact that happiness, motivation and sense of purpose have on our lives. In terms of potential, I believe we all have a much closer level than our outputs or outcomes would let us believe.
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