131–140 of 321 posts
Get your ass up from the chair and go outside to exercise if you wanna reach Antirez levels of mastery
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
If I work at it, sure, in X years, maybe I can be in the same ballpark as him. But today, if you wanted a game prototype or full game built, Notch would be worth more than 10x me. Just think of the experience he's collected.
If we're talking in the abstract, sure, maybe he isn't 1000x the programmer I am. I'm not really sure there's a huge value in looking at it that way though.
In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article. There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example: "It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order…
-10x for readability.
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. 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.
We had a guy coming into every meeting demanding we produced some low-level internal document for him. We tried to explain to him that (A) our project was not related to his project and (B) we were not comfortable giving anyone an internal implementation document of something that was highly agile.
So this went on for a year and by then the managers were really pissed off that we didn't have the "proper documentation" in place. We spent the next year creating a stable internal API and writing the documents he wanted.
What I learned from all this was that the only way to fix a -10x guy is to fire him. Because despite all this we spent the third year defending internal design decisions from a guy who wasn't even part of the team. In the end he was fired for failing to deliver in his own project - by which time our productivity doubled.
In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article. There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example: "It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order…
can provide daily anectodes but here's the last one: we use a javascript scrolling library, for reasons etc, long story short a programmer spent a couple day trying to figure out why the horizontal bar wronly showed on edge, until I went in and dropped a display none on the bar itself.
ultimately we aren't paid for technical excellence but for working programs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have definitely been involved in teams where removing the "top programmer" made everybody more productive. Usually, these developers are "10x programmers", in the sense that they write 10x the lines of code as the rest of the team, it's just all bad.
Maybe this is the distinction that throws off these "10x programmer" threads: the idea that a 10x programmer produces ten times the amount of code in a given time. The best programmers I have worked with frequently replace thousands of lines of code with hundreds. Programmer productivity is about value delivered, not lines of code.
I guess it was to show me that I was thinking too much like a C programmer, he rewrote my program in about 10 lines of Perl.
He was always willing to listen when I had design ideas that differed from his own. When my ideas were better, he'd incorporate them into our plans.
We had a four man team that was probably the most productive one of which I have ever been a member.
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…
> So sure, there are developers who are better than others, maybe even in non-linear ways, but so what? The fastest way to kill high levels of productivity is to not value high levels of productivity. Edit: And I believe there is a strong correlation between people who value high levels of productivity and people who can build highly productive work environments.
I have not found that to be true. In my experience the fastest way to kill productivity is to measure it incorrectly & incentivize bad behavior chasing the wrong thing.
Everyone values productivity but virtually no one has a good way to measure it, at least not in software.