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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

#191

Post by blub »

dangus wrote: post #79
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…

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…

I guess the "nights" part is an exaggeration. Anyone working days + nights will either burn out soon or they're on drugs and will crash and burn later.

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

#192

Post by blub »

Aeolun wrote: post #98
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…

I don't think that is unfair. It’s perfectly acceptable to be a 3x developer. What bothers me is the people that are happy to be a <1 developer. Or even a <0 developer, whose benefit to the team is net negative.

It's unfair if they're normal employees, but fine if they're contractors/have their own company.

When they're spending all their working hours on one topic they're taking a huge personal sacrifice which is invisible to their employer while at the same time raising the expectations towards their colleagues. If there's for example two such maniacs in a team, the rest can say goodbye to promotions and raises even if they're actually just as good but don't sacrifice their life at the altar of programming.

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

#193

Post by sitkack »

ten_xer wrote: post #179

As a 10x programmer myself (NOT TO BRAG) I will tell you we definitely exist. My greatest annoyance is watching the rest of you peons crawl along at a snails pace while I am inventing the next groundbreaking technology that will completely flip your existence upside down. Perhaps the only person who could even understand my level of motivation is Elon Musk, but I'm not even sure if I would have the patience to explai…

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

#194

Post by terminaljunkid »

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 claim Leslie works at 10x the speed and only needs 2x the salary, the math works out for a business major. So I guess that's the reason you need the number.

I think that's perfectly justified. So much is lost in software quality because those people think programming as dry labour and outsource to cheap sources, losing so much in future revenues but unfortunately that's not even measurable.

Joel Spolsky put it nicely in a post: It is not that it requires `n` bad programmers to do what one good programmer does. It is that `n` bad programmers can't build what a good programmer builds, no matter how big `n` is or how much time it takes.

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

#195

Post by terminaljunkid »

WalterBright wrote: post #143
wvenable wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, these other programmers get the task done but they use 10x the amount of code to do it and nobody can figure it out. It mostly works too, except on Tuesday's when it's raining.

> these other programmers get the task done And it only works on the test cases :-)

Apparently they edit tests.

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

#196

Post by jimbokun »

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…

"...but the tricky thing about examples is that some things that look hard from the outside aren't. They're just about familiarity."

And that's how you become a 10x developer.

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

#197

Post by devurand »

anon4242 wrote: post #170
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 (r…

> 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.

This is the secret sauce. The impulse to solve the higher order problem and the willingness to question fundamental assumptions in order to arrive at a solution.

Your non-10x devs might have attempted to optimize the DOS system, or maybe even introducing some kind of caching and just lived with the somewhat mitigated performance.

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

#198

Post by Aeolun »

rat9988 wrote: post #113
Aeolun wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is unfair. It’s perfectly acceptable to be a 3x developer. What bothers me is the people that are happy to be a <1 developer. Or even a <0 developer, whose benefit to the team is net negative.

>What bothers me is the people that are happy to be a We can't all be above average. So we are either all 1 developper, or some of us are bound to be less.

Fair enough, but given the current ecosystem If it ever gets to the point where everyone is floating somewhere between 0.9 and 1.1, I’ll revise my statement.

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

#200

Post by gilbetron »

logicallee wrote: post #36
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's pretty obvious that there are coders who can do the work of - all of the work of, and better than - a team of 50 talented programmers. For example when Linus wrote git he singlehandedly outprogrammed every team of version control vendors. He was a 50x programmer. (If not more.) This is a real literal example without exaggeration.

That's not an example of a 50x programmer, though. That's coming up with a truly great idea. If there is a new device that needs a driver for Linux, I can guarantee that Linus can't implement it 50x faster than a talented Linux driver developer. I think even Linus himself would agree. He's not a magical creature capable of 50x faster software development, over, say, Junio Hamano. As Linus himself said, "Junio really should get pretty much all the credit for Git—I started it, and I’ll take credit for the design, but as a project, Junio is the person who has maintained it and made it be such a pleasant tool to use.”

This is precisely where the 10x Myth comes from. Linus is not 10x a talented developer, productivity-wise. He is 1000x the value of some talented developers, because he figures out great things to make. But the "10x developer" is about productivity.

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