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

I think this myth stems from a lack of understanding of what we consider to be "work". For example, one developer could crank out 10x as many features as their peers, but never consider deploying or maintaining. The reality is that they are making everyone else slightly less productive. Similarly, they could work on 1/10th of the features, but help their 10 peers become twice as effective. Taking this even further, there's developers who can complete 1/100th of the features as their peers, but help thousands of other developers become 5% more effective.

In my mind, the mythical 10x programmer is the person that can complete business objectives while helping make those around them more effective. This isn't actually a myth, and "10x" is a completely arbitrary number that doesn't mean anything. It might as well be 2x or 1.1x -- they all mean the same thing to me. They can do their work at 1x speed, a baseline set by the developer in question and not their peers, but they can simultaneously help others around them be more productive.

I don't understand how anyone can say 10x programmers don't exist. There are programmers who DRAIN value from projects and companies. The most insidious I've dealt with are people who assure everyone their part is going to be done on time, but come the deadline, they have nothing.

I am today, a 10x better programmer than I was where I started. In terms of quality, complexity, efficiency, readability, maintainability, everything. I was paid too much when I started and/or not enough now!

Notch and Carmack are 1000x better game programmers than I am. Linus is a 1000x better file system and operating system programmer than me. Monty is a 1000x better database programmer than I am. DHH can build a website at least 10x faster than me and do it in a way that would contribute 100x more to the community than I could.

If you discard people with decades of experience. If you discard people who have specialized. If you discard the many geniuses in our field. And then if you start to make excuses at the other end, and if you narrow it to a specific set of tasks, with a specific set of complexity, then maybe there isn't a huge gap. But even then, I feel that if you apply yourself to that task for a decade or two, you'll find that you're a 10x better programmer than you used to be.

Ah, I've also seen that situation. But both times it was because the lead programmer was an autocrat who would scream at people if they did things wrong or revert their code or fail their code reviews, etc.

They were, as individuals, very productive, but they suppressed the productivity of the rest of the team.

Come on, Antirez is a x10 programmer, he coded one of the most brillant software of the last decade. It's so well done I use it as an example in my trainings, making people compile it to stop being afraid of building from source because I know it never fails and it's so damn simple.

And programmer reading anything on his blog, or anything on HN for that matter, is not an average programmer anyway. The simple fact you are interested in your work singles you out.

Guys, you need to come out of your super power bubble and come to work down here. Where people uses PHP, SVN, and don't know what an environment variable is. Where they work for money, not for passion. Where Vi is scary and they pay the licence for Oracle even if their DB has one table.

This is the huge majority of the devs : plumbers.

I find it disrespectful when people don't realize this, because it means they live a life ignoring a vast majority of dev tool users.

Not only those people are numerous, but they create a lot of wealth because they are so many.

Don't assume:

- devs know the command line

- devs know how to setup a server

- devs know how to use a package manager

- devs know how to version control, unit tests...

And above all, if they don't know how to do that, don't assume they can't do their job. Because according to their employer they do. And they are paid for it.

They won't do a graceful reload, they won't compress their css and won't escape the user input. But the website will be online, serving customers.

This is why on my blog I have articles explaining what's javascript, what's RSS, how to setup the Windows PATH, etc. Because for important tutorials on Python, I can reference those, not assuming people know what I'm talking about.

This bit articulates what I consider to be the main advantage of experience in programmers:

> Often complexity is generated when there is no willingness to recognized that a non fundamental goal of a project is accounting for a very large amount of design complexity, or is making another more important goal very hard to reach, because there is a design tension among a fundamental feature and a non fundamental one.

It happens all the time that requirements are very complex. Junior programmers will fail to implement them. Better programmers will manage to implement them, but it'll take too much time to develop and especially to maintain their solution.

Experienced programmers recognize what's happening and have the personality to stand up the project leader and get a simplified version of the requirements accepted.

It's also why very large software projects fail, especially the type that is intended to save costs by replacing many different existing informal systems by a unified one. The requirements will be ridiculously complicated (have to do everything all the projects to be replaced do), and nobody in the software development part has the power to change the organisation first.