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

161–170 of 227 posts

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

#161

Post by sub7 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #155

I think part of the objection to 10x programmers is around expectations, self-assessment, and attitudes. There are people out there who have difficulty working with others. Some of those people feel that this difficulty is because they're so FUCKING SMART and the others are morons who are beneath them. They're extremely difficult to work with in a team environment, but come across as completely confident about their…

Disagree with this. There are absolutely 10x and even 50x engineers out there. Yes they almost always have egos and people complain about them all the time.

But they also build the right product at the right time for the right user and do the work of an entire product + engineering team - often much faster.

Most large, successful companies today have a handful of these guys among the first 20 employees.

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

#162

Post by d--b »

He’s saying 10x developers are those won’t don’t code 10 times faster the same code, but those who find ways to code 10x less for the same results. that I agree with.

But then he compares 10x developers to world class athletes... That’s a bad comparison. The 10x developer is the guy who takes the bus instead of running marathon!

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

#163

Post by koonsolo »

I've been a 10x developer compared to my yesterday self.

I needed to add a feature that required a big rewrite of my framework. This would take maybe 2 weeks.

The next day I realized I could support that exact same user benefit with only a few lines of code.

Sometimes just looking at the problem differently, or sleeping over it can have a huge impact, not only compared to other developers, but also to yourself.

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

#164

Post by leroman »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #155

I think part of the objection to 10x programmers is around expectations, self-assessment, and attitudes. There are people out there who have difficulty working with others. Some of those people feel that this difficulty is because they're so FUCKING SMART and the others are morons who are beneath them. They're extremely difficult to work with in a team environment, but come across as completely confident about their…

Being a consultant for a considerable part of my career, whilst sometimes working solo on writing a system from scratch.

In one example, re-writing a system written by 7 team members + architect, taking half the time.. Maybe due to working in an organization without a formal org position.. I had to make sure bad requirements, process, tech decisions etc.. don't get in the way of properly collecting requirements, designing and building this system, seen today as a hugely successful project for this company. I have to say, some people see me as an asshole, no doubt, other's see me as a bulldozer that got the work done and stand behind me and keep in touch to this day.

Our interaction will depend heavily on if you are in my way or not, though I don't consider my self toxic or hoarder of information.

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

#165

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

> I developed them in 3 days, by writing a C program to automatically generate the range of tests.

So they were 10X at that task. Are they like that, consistently, all the time? Maybe next time it's another person's turn to have the insight on how to drastically simplify the task.

This is not "10x people" at all then. This is a "10x day" or a "10x week" in a fairly normal person.

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

#166

Post by yesbabyyes »

steveeq1 wrote: post #57
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…

Or he's using better tools and languages. (ie, smalltalk vs javascript)

One of the premises of this thread was him writing the game in x86 assembly.

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

#168

Post by dustinmoris »

This whole 10x programmers debate is tiring. Why do we even argue over such a dumb thing? OF COURSE THEY EXIST. That is not even debatable. It's a fact of life that there are people who can achieve more than others. It is the case in sports, in politics, in school, and not surprisingly also in tech.

You have football players who play their entire life and they don't progress beyond a hobby team and then you've got the likes of Christiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

The question is does it give a 10x dev a justification to behave like a dig? No, it doesn't. You still have to be a good team player, just like in a football team a 10x player won't perform well if he/she is pissing off the rest of the team.

So can we stop debabting about facts of life and just get on with it?

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

#169

Post by clarry »

overgard wrote: post #97

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…

> it's only like 10 extra seconds, except those 10 seconds times 20 times a day times a year and now that cost is out of control

10 x 20 x 5 x 47 (or however many weeks you work a year) divided by 3600 is about two days of work, or three minutes per day. Hardly an out-of-control cost. Now how many minutes do you spend on HN or other websites that have nothing to do with work?

The (potentially) bigger cost, but harder to quantify, is the effect of those distracting moments on your working memory, flow, and ability to focus on the task at hand. I, for one, would like to make code appear and things come to view on the screen at speed of thought. I think that just would make it easier to focus on the thing you're actually trying to solve, as opposed to the mechanical work of making the parts of the solution materialize in code.

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

#170

Post by anon4242 »

remmargorp64 wrote: post #3

10X programmers DO exist. They aren't just a myth, and they aren't just about knowing when to buy vs build, or when to use a particular framework or toolkit, or how to "mentor" other developers. Chris Sawyer wrote 99% of the code for RollerCoaster Tycoon in x86 assembly language, with the remaining one percent written in C. RollerCoaster Tycoon was a beautiful game which still stands the test of time to this day. The…

> It's about being FUCKING SMART

It's not always about being FUCKING SMART, sometimes just having a different attitude helps.

I've worked with testers who refused to write code but would rather test everything manually (and fall behind on every sprint!), while stupid (yes), you could easily come in and be a 100X more productive by just writing tests as code.

For one company I worked for we had an old legacy system (running DOS) that we used to produce master copies of our disk images. When we needed a new master it would take the better part of a day to make all parts work. I wrote a program that could do what the legacy system did but under Windows, taking a couple of seconds to run and now we could get a master image as a build artifact. I don't consider myself FUCKING SMART, quite the opposite, especially at that company with those coworkers who were despite the sound of it actually really smart, but unlike my coworkers I had not accepted the situation but felt that there must be something to do to improve it.

Post reply on HN