Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

There are so many factors at play in team and client environments, so the best benchmark to use is your own productivity as a programmer.

1. Solving problems for the Nth time instead of the first leads to substantial gains in productivity, easily 10X gains on your first attempt.

2. Architectural decisions add another multiplier on the above: picking the wrong database type, structuring and reorganising your models, spending time to design ahead vs coding right away, all can /10 or 10X your project easily from fixes and re-dos alone - combine both 1 and 2, and you have potential 100X gains.

3. Risk-distributing the project work: eliminating the worst 5% as the author says, and/or writing the most complex parts first to reduce risk of massive rewrites in case something doesn't meet expectations in its most critical functionality.

4. Having competent business requirements providers who won't move the ground beneath your feet. You can be 10X or 100X more productive when writing new code, and that much slower when rewriting someone else's bad decisions. It's no different than trying to build a skyscraper on foundations built for a garage.

Stack the above as A x B x C x D and you can see why you might be able to beat your past self 10X or 100X and more between projects. Having teammates who can beat you is even better if you can learn from them and accelerate your own progress by skipping time consuming mistakes.

It seems to me a few people fit their jobs/environment others don't. The few who fit are productive, those who aren't where they are supposed to be are not. We should be discussing how to help people learn what environment/job works for them and empowering them, instead of trying to focus on the mythical 10x programmer. Don't get me wrong some programmers are very talented (and thus more productive), but I think this is due in great part to their ability to add value in a particular setting.

A 10x games programmer in a small studio could easily become a 0.1x web dev in a big web dev team.

Great article, as I'm a bit of an old hat myself I'd like to add a few extra categories -

Knows how to handle not knowing or getting stuck - some people have a melt down or won't ask for help when they hit a wall or don't know when to push back (we had a vendor that gave us buggy code but kept claiming it wasn't until we pushed back through our management and forced them to let us see the code).

Can visualise the program - how much of a program someone can hold in their head is the only thing I've really seen make a programmer exceptional. It is rare and I've only met a couple of people that can hold a medium sized program in their head, the whole thing this ability lets them basically just vomit it all out into the editor without having to switch between functional and structural context and really does make for a big productivity bonus (maybe as much as 4x).

Kobayashi Maru

This is what I use right now for cross-browser smooth scrolling. It's native first with a jQuery fallback.

  
      html, body {
          scroll-behavior: smooth;
      }
  

  
      // Uses native smooth scrolling if available, otherwise uses a jQuery fallback
      // Just add data-scroll attribute to any anchor you want to make smooth
      // Add data-scroll-header to a sticky nav / header to offset the window top
      if (!('scrollBehavior' in document.documentElement.style)) {
          // jQuery fallback
          // Taken from https://css-tricks.com/snippets/jquery/smooth-scrolling/
          $('[data-scroll]').click(function() {
              if (location.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') == this.pathname.replace(/^\//,'') && location.hostname == this.hostname) {
                  var target = $(this.hash);
                  target = target.length ? target : $('[name=' + this.hash.slice(1) +']');
                  if (target.length) {
                      $('html, body').animate({
                          scrollTop: target.offset().top - $('[data-scroll-header]').height()
                      }, 600);
                      return false;
                  }
              }
          });
      }