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Busting the 10x software engineer myth

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Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#281

Post by jahewson »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #262
bjourne wrote: post #97

This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at…

I think the point of x10 devs is this doesn't occur in other fields. It's like a HR Moore's Law. I've always understood it as: if you step back and see the easy way, it's easy to be x10. But most jobs are dominated by actual unavoidable straightforward work . Another exception is mathematics. You can certainly have a x10 mathematician! But it's not a mainstream job.

> this doesn't occur in other fields

It absolutely does, just look at surgeons.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#282

Post by Jensson »

denton-scratch wrote: post #276

Ari-Pekka makes various plausible-sounding declarations, but he doesn't even try to make a case. I know that I've had many colleagues that were next to useless - even, possibly, exhibiting negative utility. Let's just give that kind a zero. Then there are novices - smart people with little experience. They can get stuff done, but they need watching. Suppose we give those a 1. And suppose we give an "average" dev, fai…

> Software development is a process of discovering and remedying bugs - from the requirements, through the design, to the implementation

The fastest developers are those who barely put in bugs in the first place not those who are good at finding the bugs they themselves put in.

Example: Two developers writes half of a project. Developer A's code has 10 bugs, developer B's code has 1 bug. They both work together to fix the bugs, developer A fixed 4 of A's bugs while B fixed 6 of A's bug and his own bug. In total A fixed 4 and B fixed 7. In this case it looks like B was almost twice as effective, but if B didn't have to fix A's bugs he would have been way faster, especially since fixing others bugs is way harder than fixing your own.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#283

Post by 908B64B197 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #147
latch wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree, but I think you can use examples closer to home. Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics (quality, cost, time to deliver) than I could. Still too far? Pick your field, there'll be experts. You can get even closer to home. After 20 year, I really feel like I'm at least 10x developer across a number of metrics (e.g., value to my employer, amount of complexity I can ma…

> Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness. Sometimes being 10x is only a matter of being free to help the best you can. EDIT: where Carmack shows that he is well above average is not in coding, but in being extremely pragmatic and thous being able to extract good, almost unbiased, information out of every discussion, even the m…

> But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness.

Not sure that's a bug.

Seems no matter what Jobs thought, Carmack kept bringing value and shipping great software.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#284

Post by jodrellblank »

eloisant wrote: post #242
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Marathon runners run 42 km in like two hours but it would take me days to finish the same distance... Not really. If you walk at an easy pace of 2 miles per hour, and start at 6am, you'll be done in time for an evening meal. At 3 mph, you might even make afternoon tea. The world record marathon times are, in fact, only about 4-6x what you can do as a walking human being.

Correct - and if you compare world record marathon runners with average (but seasoned) marathon runners, the difference is even smaller.

Specifically, RunningWorld.com took data from 107.9M runners over 70,000 events over 209 countries over 32 years and found the "average" finish time was about 4:32hrs. The men's world record is ~2 hours.

https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/training/marathon/a27787958/...

(That link has a video of people on a giant treadmill, moving at Kipchogi's world record pace, trying to keep up).

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#285

Post by 908B64B197 »

m12k wrote: post #139
dijit wrote: post #3

I know "10x engineers" exist; some people are fakes and put forward things that look like they have high impact but are actually a bit shoddy. Some people like to be present and suck up. But some people really do just work hard, smart and have deep passion for what they're doing- and importantly: pride, which makes the quality of the content great too. Some of the best engineers I know "visit" bits of code or infrast…

On the flipside, I've met "10x engineers" who always prioritized working on highly visible and strategic new features, and excelled at shipping them as fast as possible, even if it meant racking up massive technical debt. By doing this, they effectively did produce 10x as much in the eyes of management, and got promoted and rewarded in kind. The technical debt they racked up then got paid by everyone else that had to…

Their value is in shipping fast.

If competitors are working on the same feature and manage to roll it out of the door first, that spells trouble.

First version of Twitter was an almost complete re-write because of performance issues. But since their concept was dead simple, they had to get market shares fast else someone else was going to be there first.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#286

Post by AlwaysRock »

lixtra wrote: post #175
AlwaysRock wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this all depends on your definition of 10x. It sounds like you are saying 10x the average person rather than 10x the average person who works in that field. I'm a 10x developer if we count non developers. I am not if we could people who work as developers. Likewise there are expert marathon runners who are 10X, or more, than the average human. But there are not marathon runners who run 10x faster than other p…

> But there are not marathon runners who run 10x faster than other professional marathon runners. It’s true that they don’t run 10 times as fast, but the marathon runner that is 1% faster will finish 10x more races before the slower one (YMMV depending on stdev). Similar in software development, picking a 1% better local solution often enough can make the global result 10x better due to the complexity of the systems.

So 1x devs exist? I agree.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#287

Post by confidantlake »

For a lot of basic crud software something is very wrong if there is even a possibility of having a 10x engineer. I worked on a project that was basically just forms. Should have been really basic, anything a junior engineer could build. Nope! The 10x engineer instead built out his own form library. Incredibly difficult to use, obviously undocumented, extremely buggy. To build static forms with a little bit of validation. So yeah he was a 10x engineer because he made everyone else a .1x engineer.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#288

Post by AtlasBarfed »

latch wrote: post #135
bjourne wrote: post #97

This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at…

I totally agree, but I think you can use examples closer to home. Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics (quality, cost, time to deliver) than I could. Still too far? Pick your field, there'll be experts. You can get even closer to home. After 20 year, I really feel like I'm at least 10x developer across a number of metrics (e.g., value to my employer, amount of complexity I can ma…

Your case of Carmack is illustrative.

To achieve 100x, consider what he was doing:

- writing a first person shooter (Castle Wolfenstein 3d)

- writing a first person shooter (Doom)

- writing a first person shooter (Quake)

... you get the idea.

Now, there was enormous leaps in maximal utilitilization of hardware, but do you notice a pattern? The requirements are basically fixed.

Most 10x I've achieved in a short fashion or observed was due to some similar parameters:

- the requirements were stable

- the basic problem was done before and practiced, and implementaiton was a variation/improvement of the previous

- solo or very small development team where greenfield imposed little barriers

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#289

Post by fouric »

WalterBright wrote: post #2

I can cite many examples of a 10x engineer having an insight that greatly shortened the development time. It's not that they write code faster. It's that they select a path to the solution that is a lot shorter.

Why not both? There's at least a factor of 3x difference between the volume of the most prolific programmers I know and the least. If John Carmack ships the product in 1/10th the time of Average Joe, I would call him a 10x engineer regardless of whether he picked a smarter design or if he simply implemented the dumb design 10x faster (or anything in between, obviously).

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#290

Post by [deleted] »

bjourne wrote: post #97

This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at…

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