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The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

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Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#161

Post by vinceguidry »

MichaelGG wrote: post #144
ido wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the worst (or even simply "kinda bad") are so much worse that it's not hard to believe and even bigger gap exists.

I once spoke to a guy that literally did not understand the lifetime scope of local variables nor how simple field assignment worked (a.x = y). I don't mean this in an esoteric, edge-case, way, but quite literally. I asked him why he didn't hire some devs to do the work for him, and his answer was "most devs are terrible and I've not found people that are as good as me". The downward range goes very, very deep. And t…

> I've personally rewritten an app in less than a week that had two devs on it for over 6 months. Their deliverable didn't really work at all, even after the 1+ minute loading time

To be fair, a lot of that six months was probably just nailing down the requirements. Your rewrite enjoyed having that design work already done.

I'd argue that building applications is 90% design, 10% code. The code part can balloon to a greater fraction if the developers are not competent enough of course.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#162

Post by DougWebb »

nojvek wrote: post #110
awkward wrote: post #101

The reason for pushback on the idea 10x programmers isn't the real gradient of skill, it's the labor aspect. Lots of companies want to hire 10x without paying 10x dollars, and they've figured out that blowing smoke up the ass of young people (though it works better on young men than women) is a way to squeeze blood from that stone. Especially if you're working in a small company, you're going to hit a point when ther…

In addition not being able to measure 10x just makes things hairy. Am I a 10x, probably if you ask me to pump a couple of CRUD pages. Am I a 10x in adding features to a compiler. Probably not. If a business hires me thinking I am a 10x-er they have high hopes that I can't satisfy for their dimension of X. There are good programmers, great programmers and dangerous programmers. But that's all relative to what work nee…

If you're capable of both pumping out CRUD pages and adding features to a compiler, then you may be a 10x developer.

I consider myself to be a 10x developer, but I'm not 10x all of the time for all tasks. Things that set me apart are the quality of my code vs other developer's code for a given amount of development time, the higher probability of my code being bug-free or nearly so before I've even run it, my skill at tackling extensive refactoring tasks with zero change in code behavior without needing to write and constantly run tests, etc. These skills all come from long-term experience, wide variety, and a fearlessness and belief that no development task is beyond my capability.

If you look at athletes, you'll see some that are really good at one particular sport, some that are naturals at pretty much anything they try, some that enjoy sports but aren't particularly good at it, and some (like me) that are so non-athletic that it's embarrassing. I think development skills are like that too. We can't really identify what '10x' means, because it depends on context and isn't tied to specific skills or behaviors.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#163

Post by BoiledCabbage »

awkward wrote: post #101

The reason for pushback on the idea 10x programmers isn't the real gradient of skill, it's the labor aspect. Lots of companies want to hire 10x without paying 10x dollars, and they've figured out that blowing smoke up the ass of young people (though it works better on young men than women) is a way to squeeze blood from that stone. Especially if you're working in a small company, you're going to hit a point when ther…

The 10x programmer idea really is a overall negative influence on our industry. Yes they exist, and acknowledging that is the only benefit that came from it.

All of the negatives are: You get significant Lake Wobegon, and a ton of people think they are 10x that aren't (including a significant portion of people on this very website). People attempt to measure their 10xness in comparison to the worst engineer they know or work with (which is really likely comparing a 2x engineer to a 0.2 engineer). We have no way of evaluating it. No good way of hiring for it. The majority of actual 10x engineers don't get paid like it (they're just known as that really good engineer on the team / company). People spend time writing about it, and reading about it to no real benefit.

It really is the ultimate programmer insecurity. If Cosmo made a magazine for programmers it would likely be their splashy headline every other week.

The reason I mention it, is that it's wasted effort even thinking about it. If you're an engineer, figure out what you can do to improve your skills. Some things are flashy, some things are mundane. If you're hiring engineers, figure out what you can do to improve your hiring accuracy.

I posit (with no proof) that nothing useful has come from the 10x programmer discussions beyond the 6 months following its introduction.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#164

Post by mcguire »

Bartweiss wrote: post #123
awkward wrote: post #101

The reason for pushback on the idea 10x programmers isn't the real gradient of skill, it's the labor aspect. Lots of companies want to hire 10x without paying 10x dollars, and they've figured out that blowing smoke up the ass of young people (though it works better on young men than women) is a way to squeeze blood from that stone. Especially if you're working in a small company, you're going to hit a point when ther…

> you're going to hit a point when there is a massive wall of work to be done, bigger than you would ever be able to handle alone This is my core complaint. All software development is (eventually) rate-limited somewhere other than developer brilliance. Most business software hits this limit fast. A huge portion of business software is stuff you can't solve with brilliance - tasks from integrating with other companie…

True, but even the most mundane environment has a lot of problems that are better solved by making things simpler rather than managing the complexity better.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#165

Post by ianbicking »

didibus wrote: post #143

I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. Now, I've seen 10x quality, though sometimes they're a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for…

10x productivity is fairly common when onboarding people to a project, though it's not quite so obvious because you'll give the new person small bugs or stories. And if someone is simply not productive, there might continue to be a 10x between team members, and the team keeps giving the unproductive person small or non-essential tasks, and not accounting for the support that member receives to finish that work.

I've been on both sides of the 10x divide (i.e., the 1x working with a 10x, the 10x working with a 1x). To be clear, these productivity levels were relative to the project, understanding of the project, and the point in the project's lifecycle. There's native talent, but context is just as important.

It's not really sustainable to have that productivity difference unless you have a team structure to support it and bring people up – and sometimes I wonder if the team structure is more emotional cover than an actual aggregate productivity boost. It's not sustainable because the 1x developer can't handle the 10x developer's velocity of change. If you are the 1x developer, just at the point when you think you've finally made a valuable improvement, the rug gets pulled out from underneath you yet again because of a change or fix made by someone else. It's demoralizing for everyone, and the 1x developer often becomes the 0x developer (I'm afraid this has also happened to me).

It's harder to find unsustainable states because they don't last for long (team breaks up, everyone becomes demoralized, people drift off, etc), which is part of why I think 10x productivity is sometimes treated as a myth.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#166

Post by fnord123 »

TimJYoung wrote: post #128
icebraining wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's essentially building an ORM (well, a data mapping layer) out of PL/SQL functions rather than your main language. Why would that be better?

I think he's saying that there was a lot of duplication in the client SQL for various applications (copy/paste, probably). Using SQL functions/procedures/views to return the same result sets would eliminate the duplication and provide "one true source" for such queries. Plus, it would reside in the actual database, allowing it to be portable and not requiring any extra work in the client applications.

Yes, exactly. Also, tables could be refactored without having to update clients.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#167

Post by fnord123 »

ch4s3 wrote: post #95
fnord123 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inconsistent data fields being returned by various queries, resulting in inconsistent api endpoint data returned to the client and thus inability to safely abstract without significant hacks/nebulous data model state. You are coding against actual queries? Why not functions to hide the table abstractions: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-createfun... https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/create-…

>Why not functions to hide the table abstractions Isn't that roughly what an ORM/ODM is?

ORM is in the client. I'm talking about making wrapping functions for popular views in the database itself.

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#169

Post by poikniok »

didibus wrote: post #143

I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. Now, I've seen 10x quality, though sometimes they're a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for…

"scrum" I found your issue. I don't think 10x developers work in places that do "scrum", as if they are some low skill assembly line worker. You think Jeff Dean does "scrum"?

Re: The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)

#170

Post by MichaelGG »

vinceguidry wrote: post #161
MichaelGG wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once spoke to a guy that literally did not understand the lifetime scope of local variables nor how simple field assignment worked (a.x = y). I don't mean this in an esoteric, edge-case, way, but quite literally. I asked him why he didn't hire some devs to do the work for him, and his answer was "most devs are terrible and I've not found people that are as good as me". The downward range goes very, very deep. And t…

> I've personally rewritten an app in less than a week that had two devs on it for over 6 months. Their deliverable didn't really work at all, even after the 1+ minute loading time To be fair, a lot of that six months was probably just nailing down the requirements. Your rewrite enjoyed having that design work already done. I'd argue that building applications is 90% design, 10% code. The code part can balloon to a g…

That's possible. But more likely, given they included over 100MB of system32 binaries with the app, they just didn't know what they were doing.
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