101–110 of 227 posts
I think team sports is a good analogy here. There's no people who are 10x stronger, or who can run 10x faster than their teammates, but there's certainly people who'd score 10x points in certain circumstances than anybody else, and that is what 10x programmer is about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> not so smart that you’re just lost when talking to them That, BTW, is a sure sign that someone is trying to appear smarter than they really are. Having worked at 2 research labs over the course of my career I know more than my fair share of genius-level people. Without fail, they are humble about it, and can explain complex concepts in a way the rest of us can understand. This is something that just blows my mind…
> a sure sign that someone is trying to Nope. Explaining things well is a skill. One can be non-excellent at it. Its possible to have a moderately-good grasp of something that you can use while working with it, but not yet have come up with good ways to make your knowledge explicit in a well-organized fashion.
Part of being great at something includes an ability to abstract out common difficulties, which helps other people to understand (even when you are not that great at explaining).
I'm not aware that I've ever met a genius who was working on completely different principles to other people - everyone reaches the same difficulties and has to find a way to resolve those.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm. Last week a PM was gushing to me it "only" took a week to implement a feature that was not much more than an extra if statement. This is not in a regulated industry either, just run of the mill web stuff.
I do tech at a non-tech company. Colleague has been doing Python for about 6 months. He can't do for-loops. His brain just doesn't get the concept (among others), I've never seen anything like it. Other guys make general computing mistakes like trying to type into a command prompt while another window is in focus, then messaging me saying "there was an error."
When I get these kinds of messages I just want to strangle the person on the other end.
Cool, an error. What did you do to try and fix it? Or was your first step to contact me?! (hint: it is)
I agree with the article, but I also think it leaves out something fairly important, which is minimizing huge time sinks. Instead of being 10x better, how can you reduce wasted time 10x? I remember working with this one guy that was light years smarter than me, but if you watched him use the IDE it was painful . He did everything in the menus, slowly. How much of his life could he have back from memorizing f5 and a c…
Some of this advice is good but actually being speedy is not necessary.
I agree with the article, but I also think it leaves out something fairly important, which is minimizing huge time sinks. Instead of being 10x better, how can you reduce wasted time 10x? I remember working with this one guy that was light years smarter than me, but if you watched him use the IDE it was painful . He did everything in the menus, slowly. How much of his life could he have back from memorizing f5 and a c…
What is really going to save you (and your team) time is knowing to have a test for the critical scenario(s).
Or knowing to build something right (and finding out what right means) the first time around.
From my perspective, it's all about trying to save yourself from future work.
Here is your 10x programmer: https://norvig.com/sudoku.html "In this essay I tackle the problem of solving every Sudoku puzzle. It turns out to be quite easy (about one page of code for the main idea and two pages for embellishments) using two ideas: constraint propagation and search." If you gave this task to an "average" developer, how long would it take for them to implement? How many lines of code would it be? Wo…
I’ve gotten solving a sudoku puzzle as an interview question, to be implemented in full in 45 mins.
10x programmers do exist. But here's the thing: its not worth being a 10x programmer. Managers don't necessarily want them. First of all, if you complete a project 10x faster than the expected time, managers will assume that they had overestimated the project, as opposed to recognizing that you're a 10x programmer. I have seen this time after time after time. Secondly, if a manager does recognize that you're a 10x pr…
All through reading this thread, my thought was that I'd rather be a force multiplier than a 10x programmer. I'd rather make an entire team write better, more maintainable code than just do more of the code myself. Past a certain point, the force multiplier adds more overall, plus their influence results in less _bad_ code, they raise the minimum bar.
Here is your 10x programmer: https://norvig.com/sudoku.html "In this essay I tackle the problem of solving every Sudoku puzzle. It turns out to be quite easy (about one page of code for the main idea and two pages for embellishments) using two ideas: constraint propagation and search." If you gave this task to an "average" developer, how long would it take for them to implement? How many lines of code would it be? Wo…
I saw that you mentioned a spell-checker, and thought "I'd use levenshtein distance. That wouldn't be hard to implement on a flight. I wonder what he did that's better." Turns out, he used levenshtein distance, and tuned the results with frequency estimates. I don't know if I'd have thought of that, but it's also not a mysterious technique--I'm confident a lot of people who work more in related areas than I do would think of it.
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…
Agreed. I've never encountered someone that I think is genuinely a 10x programmer. I've worked with a few people that thought I was one, which I'm most certainly not, and I've explained that to them. I've encountered a lot of what I would call .2x programmers though. As you've said, there are a lot of people that are really bad at the job. It's not a slight either - there are a lot of people doing this job that reall…
Why stop there, throw a negative coefficient on it. Some bad programmers actively cost other people's productivity and drain profit when their poor decisions or implementations need to be fixed (or they constantly ask the same questions and never seem to grow past that stage).
Here is your 10x programmer: https://norvig.com/sudoku.html "In this essay I tackle the problem of solving every Sudoku puzzle. It turns out to be quite easy (about one page of code for the main idea and two pages for embellishments) using two ideas: constraint propagation and search." If you gave this task to an "average" developer, how long would it take for them to implement? How many lines of code would it be? Wo…
I got into programming because I love the toy problems, but it means that once I have something 90% solved in my head it becomes a huge struggle to continue. Sometimes in my working life I'd have to whip something up to fix an issue or provide a POC which gets thrown away or given to a team (I don't care either way) and those were the best projects.