Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

payne.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 227 posts

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

#131

Post by hnews_account_1 »

starpilot wrote: post #70
WJW wrote: post #50

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."

This is not at all comparable to that insane example you just gave, but a lot of people are just tool users in non tech companies. I know because I've seen it in finance. They're absolutely brilliant in their statistical concepts, but their programming skills leave a lot to be desired for because they don't have the background.

For instance, when you move from C++ to Python, you kinda realise after a month or so that normal loops won't cut it for stuff like numpy arrays etc due to the huge overhead. I realised this personally because I knew how quick C++ was and I wondered why the same code in Python was so massively slow, and I read up online to understand it. Similarly in matlab, for loops are very fast but still inefficient. So now when I write code, I use inbuilt libraries as much as possible and in matlab, I make everything into a matrix operation so it is blazingly fast once I scale it to a million data points.

My colleagues have no idea what that shit is. They'll know every step of a complicated algorithm and implement it simply using loops.

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

#132

Post by ClumsyPilot »

passivepinetree wrote: post #124
karatestomp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Please dont say that, it's very, very easy to produce beautiful code that will never make any money!

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

#133

Post by ClumsyPilot »

mikekchar wrote: post #130

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 h…

Are we talking about a case where a given developer has re-written 100 lines of code, and added 1 line net?

Or do you mean that only 1 line was written or re-written? If so, what are people doing, having 7-hour meetings?

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

#134

Post by hnews_account_1 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #127
ivalm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 standa…

Regardless of the success of git, it's novel branching tech was what set it apart. And he did beat entire teams of coders to that solution. Of course his name was what lent it so much credence, but a good solution tends to make waves in online communities. Best example? Bitcoin.

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

#135

Post by whateveracct »

If you're really 10x and you're giving that 10x to some company and not getting 10x value, you're doing yourself a disservice! Either get fair value (probably won't happen) or give them less than that 10x and use your spare energy for other pursuits (relaxing, entrepreneurship, art, hobbies, etc)

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

#136

Post by mikekchar »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #133
mikekchar wrote: post #130

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 h…

Are we talking about a case where a given developer has re-written 100 lines of code, and added 1 line net? Or do you mean that only 1 line was written or re-written? If so, what are people doing, having 7-hour meetings?

No. We had 31 million lines of code and it was so complex that even changing 1 line had massive implications. Definitely the worst code base I've ever worked on. I originally started working there as a contractor because they had single functions which had reached the file size limits for their build system and they didn't know what to do (you know... maybe split this function up into smaller functions... maybe...). There were people who were unrolling loops because they were unaware that the compiler would do it for them under the hood. And then somebody would modify one part of that loop, so you'd be looking for some strange behaviour and it would be buried in the middle of some code that was copy and pasted 100 times. Total nightmare. Don't even get me started on how they did their memory allocation.

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

#137

Post by 1996 »

triangleman wrote: post #126
1996 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Terrible? I'm sure free software was also considered terrible 15 years ago at Microsoft! In fact, more than terrible- it was perceived as a cancer!

Linux was sucking value away from real research in the form of copyleft (lost IP rights), financial speculation (VA Linux IPO, etc), hacking and other forms of cybercrime (don't they show nmap in the Matrix?)

But perceptions change.

The only thing that doesn't change much is the value created, as measured on the public markets.

Whether you like or dislike the morality Bitcoin (and there is more dislike on HN as usual), the market seems to indicate its potential is greater than an isolated dislike.

You are free to be like the Microsoft of the last millenium and consider Bitcoin as a terrible cancer. But I think your perception will change with time.

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

#138

Post by 1996 »

hnews_account_1 wrote: post #134
jodrellblank wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 standa…

Regardless of the success of git, it's novel branching tech was what set it apart. And he did beat entire teams of coders to that solution. Of course his name was what lent it so much credence, but a good solution tends to make waves in online communities. Best example? Bitcoin.

> Best example? Bitcoin.

Yeah but people here don't like to hear that :-)

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

#140

Post by DonHopkins »

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 once worked with a -2X engineer, whose code was so bad that it took twice as long for a 1X engineer to undo the damage he wrought.
Post reply on HN