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The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

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Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#121

Post by meowface »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #72
gilbetron wrote: post #10

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…

> It comes from terrible "corporate drone" software developers in the 80s and 90s - the ones that would takes weeks to developer simple routines. Ironically, a lot of the 0.1X engineers I've worked with in the 2010s were the most technically competent. Obsession with cutting-edge tools and being technically correct over shipping quickly can sink a person's productivity. They're the people leading the charge to rewrit…

>A brilliant engineer with all of the knowledge in the world can still sink a team by working on the wrong things all the time.

From HN comments, I get the impression that this is a common problem at companies like Uber. Lots of smart engineers with great technical talent, but they spend all their time making pet apps and services which satiate their interest in and excitement towards programming/engineering, but which have not much direct relation to the actual product or any other ultimate business objectives. If there is any relation, it's indirection upon indirection. I imagine this is probably because the core product is so narrowly-focused and basically "done" that they have to look for any other way to spend their time and energy without getting bored and demotivated.

I would guess this happens at a lot of companies with single, simple (from the user's perspective), narrowly-focused products, like Twitter.

Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#123

Post by nhumrich »

I find that I am a 10x developer when I compare myself to other versions of myself. I have had days where I honestly feel bad because I got almost nothing done, and other days where I get a ton done. If I was able to correctly channel my focus and effort, I would be 10x then I used to be. Now sure, maybe the time spent not as focused allows me to have those bursts of productivity.

Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#124

Post by passivepinetree »

karatestomp wrote: post #38
Nition wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to diminish the achievement, but worth noting I think that RollerCoaster Tycoon was based on his earlier Transport Tycoon engine, so at least he did get to split the work up between two projects. I have a personal theory the that the average 10x programmer is say 2.5x smarter than average, but also 4x more focused on work, netting a 2.5x4=10x total when you remove all the procrastination and general fumbling arou…

Environment and control (true ownership) can easily turn 1x into 10x, I'd say. Not saying I could churn out Rollercoaster Tycoon but I bet I'd look, by every metric both reasonable and unreasonable, a hell of a lot more productive working on a game solo with 100% control of all decisions and not having to fret about having something to report in standup every day versus... normal work.

There’s an easy way to find out if that’s true, and it’s to making a similarly successful solo project by yourself!

Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#125

Post by lincpa »

If you use [The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow v3.0 with Warehouse/Workshop Model](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow), although the development speed will be a little slower, thinking will be a little more, but later reading, incremental development and maintenance will be less than ten times.

Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#126

Post by triangleman »

1996 wrote: post #73
logicallee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty obvious that there are coders who can do the work of - all of the work of, and better than - a team of 50 talented programmers. For example when Linus wrote git he singlehandedly outprogrammed every team of version control vendors. He was a 50x programmer. (If not more.) This is a real literal example without exaggeration.

Yes -- but you shouldn't state the truth because it makes every non-top programmer feel bad :-) I have another similar funny example - whoever invented bitcoin, that person single handledly created more value than all the YC startups put together PLUS a lot of other incubators, plus a lot of other companies. I wouldn't be surprised if in less than 10 years, you could add to that the total capitalization of the FANG (…

Ouch the Bitcoin example is terrible and really detracts from your argument. Currently Bitcoin is sucking value away from real economic output in the form of energy (electricity), financial speculation, money laundering, and cybercrime.

Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#127

Post by jodrellblank »

ivalm wrote: post #111
JackFr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a good portion of the story there was thorough knowledge of prior art, the ability to identify what was essential and what was incidental and the fact that he built on a singular vision.

Sure, but none of those things were monopolized by Linus. Other teams/engineers could have done the same, tried to do the same.

How do you know they didn’t do the same or better? Linus has the advantage of a huge audience (of adoring fans, no less), there were competing dvcs’s at the time - mercurial, bazaar, darcs - and likely many more in companies and lone developer machines which weren’t successful.

If Linus had released Git quietly, but put his name behind mercurial and used it for the Linux kernel, would Git still be the de-facto standard today? Or is his popularity and influence at least as big a factor as his design or code skills?

Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#128

Post by ClumsyPilot »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #72
gilbetron wrote: post #10

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…

> It comes from terrible "corporate drone" software developers in the 80s and 90s - the ones that would takes weeks to developer simple routines. Ironically, a lot of the 0.1X engineers I've worked with in the 2010s were the most technically competent. Obsession with cutting-edge tools and being technically correct over shipping quickly can sink a person's productivity. They're the people leading the charge to rewrit…

I think that's often overlooked, good judgement does matter, and probably comes with experience.

Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#129

Post by hnews_account_1 »

m0zg wrote: post #68
saagarjha wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never encountered someone that I think is genuinely a 10x programmer. I have. (Interestingly, some of these people knew this and had a surprising lack of modesty about it as well…) Usually I think it boils down to being able to have the experience to consistently guess right on things, come up with new ideas, and not get tangled in the weeds: most of them are smart, but not so smart that you’re just lost when…

>> 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…

I highly doubt explanatory capability is a sure sign of genius. I have it in that I can explain it to an equally smart person who doesn't know the field. But the reason I can do that is because if I don't extract the essentials of what I'm doing, I get confused myself. I spend 90% of my life confused so I'll have clarity for the remaining 10% when my only slightly above average intelligence finally fits the new piece of knowledge into the jigsaw of concepts inside my brain.

Consequently, I'm generally good at explaining stuff to people who are willing to learn. If nothing, I don't disparage the ones who don't know enough just because it happens to be my field of expertise (if you're also in my field and at my level and you fuck up something simple, I'm not a forgiving person though). That makes me come across as smart and what-not, but honestly it is hours and hours of work being shut up in my room and reading and analysing a metric ton of data. This is followed by long showers where I consider the concept in many different ways and have some final grasp of it by the time I'm back to my desk.

I'm explaining all this to say that I'm very very far from genius. I've seen genius. It is a grasping ability that is technically superior to mine while I get mired in all the offshoots. And not all of them can explain a concept as well as I can.

Re: The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

#130

Post by mikekchar »

The reality of the situation is that rather than 10x programmers, there are actually 0.1x programmers. Frequently you will have teams that are so burdened by whatever hurdles are in their way that they produce only a tenth of what they could be producing. Interestingly, there are programmers who self impose those hurdles. There are programmers to impose those hurdles on others as well. Quite frequently, though, the hurdles are either imposed from afar, or occur as a result of unfortunate decision making that has accumulated over a number of years.

A real "10x" programmer is a programmer who is able to unshackled themselves from the burdens that turn them into 0.1x programmers. Beware, however, because many of these people achieve their productivity at the expense of others on the team. Indeed, there is a special breed of programmer who will inflict 0.1x burdens on the rest of the team precisely so that they can appear to be a 10x programmer.

I once worked on a team of 5000 programmers, where the average number of lines of code produced per programmer per day was 1. We can all argue that KLOC per month is a terrible productivity measure. However when your productivity is around 20 LOC per month (without the K), there is something seriously wrong ;-) 0.01x programmers (at best)????

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