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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

#181

Post by tonyedgecombe »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #174
leroman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, desi…

I'm glad this appears to give you some satisfaction, but I hope I never have to work with you, or around you, or on any project you've worked on.

I've been brought into several moribund projects similar to what @leroman is describing. Usually you are there to push past the bullshit. Often the problems start with someone similar to what you described in your original post.

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

#182

Post by perl4ever »

leroman wrote: post #164
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, desi…

"re-writing a system written by 7 team members + architect, taking half the time"

Sure, but are you saying this is about individual productivity or had you considered it might be the costs of coordination?

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

#183

Post by perl4ever »

hyperpape wrote: post #108
jimbokun wrote: post #42

Here is your 10x programmer: https://norvig.com/sudoku.html "In this essay I tackle the problem of solving every Sudoku puzzle. It turns out to be quite easy (about one page of code for the main idea and two pages for embellishments) using two ideas: constraint propagation and search." If you gave this task to an "average" developer, how long would it take for them to implement? How many lines of code would it be? Wo…

I'm sure Norvig is exceptional in many ways, quite possibly 10x, but the tricky thing about examples is that some things that look hard from the outside aren't. They're just about familiarity. I saw that you mentioned a spell-checker, and thought "I'd use levenshtein distance. That wouldn't be hard to implement on a flight. I wonder what he did that's better." Turns out, he used levenshtein distance, and tuned the re…

“Four thousand dollars!” gasped the CEO. “All you did was walk over and push a little button on the side of that machine. Can you give us a breakdown?” The consultant jotted on a piece of paper and handed it to the CEO.

“Pushing button: $1 Knowing which button to push: $3999″

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

#184

Post by patrec »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #174
leroman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, desi…

I'm glad this appears to give you some satisfaction, but I hope I never have to work with you, or around you, or on any project you've worked on.

This cuts both ways, smart and competent people might also not like to work with you or any project you've worked on.

I have no real insight into your personality and ability (but neither do you about GF).

Competent people who want or need to fix some dysfunctional monstrosity committed by a coherent group of less able developers are not necessarily welcome, even if they don't have pathological personality traits. All the more if they are not parachuted in to fix something, but e.g. some new starter not high up in the hierarchy. Consider that few people take kindly to being told (if only by implication) that what they've done is garbage, but obviously the world is full of garbage software.

I've seen this time and time again. Long-term diplomacy can sometimes work (assuming the company and individual have the time to spare), but they'll usually need some higher up backing or fail miserably/leave/get-fired.

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

#185

Post by tonyedgecombe »

xupybd wrote: post #119
dangus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other factor is a lack of personal life boundaries. The 10x engineers that I’ve interacted with can be found working on nights and weekends because they enjoy it and have nothing better to do. Working those nights and weekends without coworker interruption also means that they get to learn more things freely rather than being interrupted. As a result they tend to be highly productive, but I’d argue that it could…

These engineers end up with much more experience in a shorter time span. The guy that worked 40 hours for the last 5 years is going to have far less experience than the guy who worked 60 hours for the last 5. More experience tends to lead to better decision making and better code. That said I'm the 40 hour guy. I want to work to live not live to work. That will make me less of a developer than others but I think I st…

I'm not sure about that, there are diminishing returns on extra hours. If you work long enough hours then it will start to have a detrimental effect.

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

#186

Post by perl4ever »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #147

Y'know, productivity is kind of overrated. The programmers who I admire aren't the people who could implement a React CMS in record time, but the people who built React. Or Rust, or Haskell, or FFmpeg. I guess one could argue that the programmers are 10x, 100x or even (10^n)x simply because their work has helped other programmers become more effective, thus through the multiplier effect resulting in massive productiv…

If you know which algorithm to use or how to find one, then you can accomplish things with even greater multipliers. But empirically, people with many years of experience that have seen everything aren't valued so maybe it just isn't that valuable.

Maybe coordination problems just drown out individual productivity most of the time. Or, looking at it another way, if someone senior (as an IC) hasn't found their way into a position where they have leverage ("impact") already, then they don't have the only (meta-) skill that matters.

But then again, when you won't pay people enough to retain them and "Leslie" happens to be the most productive and abhor interviewing, then maybe you end up with literally one person replacing ten.

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

#187

Post by perl4ever »

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…

"trade off technical debt against speed of execution"

eh? The most important thing I think I've learned is how to trade speed of completion and flexibility and comprehensibility versus putting too much effort into avoiding technical debt and speedy execution.

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

#188

Post by learnstats2 »

afarrell wrote: post #115
learnstats2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderately-good is not genius. Part of being great at something includes an ability to abstract out common difficulties, which helps other people to understand (even when you are not that great at explaining). I'm not aware that I've ever met a genius who was working on completely different principles to other people - everyone reaches the same difficulties and has to find a way to resolve those.

> Moderately-good is not genius. Agreed. But moderately-good is also not "a sure sign that someone is trying to appear smarter than they are". > everyone reaches the same difficulties That is definitely false. I've had difficulties with social skills, the writing process, and knowing how to direct my attention. Some of these are so alien to other people that when I ask questions, it is not uncommon to get responses l…

>> everyone reaches the same difficulties

> That is definitely false.

A bit strong, and I don't think your examples are necessarily contradicting this. Obviously everyone has their own experience.

Responses such as "You're overthinking things" most often mean: 'I overcame this problem with practice but it happened subconsciously, so I'm not able to express how I did this.'

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

#189

Post by lazarljubenovic »

dustinmoris wrote: post #168

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 th…

I never understood the concept of 10x apart from it being a (misused) meme. For (almost) every developer you can find one that will do "the thing" a few times faster and one that will do it a few times slower. It also depends on what is "the thing".

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

#190

Post by leroman »

perl4ever wrote: post #182
leroman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, desi…

"re-writing a system written by 7 team members + architect, taking half the time" Sure, but are you saying this is about individual productivity or had you considered it might be the costs of coordination?

I wasn't meaning to say anything about the "why", just the facts.. For starters, the project I was working on was a success, the other failed.. so its not even comparing the same thing.

Just offering my anecdotal story as a potential "asshole" offender per OP

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