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The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

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Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#61

Post by eloff »

This isn't backed up by evidence or a sound argument, and comparing the capability of women to have babies with the productivity of programmers nicely sums up the intelligence of the argument.

Teams follow the 80/20 rule as well. 20% of the developers do 80% of the work (there is actually evidence in support of this, but I'm not going to look it up now)

Rockstar developers are a real thing. I work with some. I like to think I am one. I'm not talking about loud developers which the author seems to conflate with rockstar developers. I'm talking about the quiet thoughtful guys who have an amazing grasp of how everything fits together. They see the problem in amazing detail with all it's hairiness and then devise a simple, elegant solution for it.

Rockstar developers are the guys who solve the right problems. And there's an infinite gap between them and the bottom guys, because for some problems, the worst developers will never solve them. They tend to be around 10x as productive as above-average developers on the hardest problems. On easy problems there's a much smaller difference.

In my free time I work on a multi-threaded high-performance ACID relational database with concurrent algorithms, custom memory allocation and layout, hybrid index data structures and garbage collection algorithms. I don't know too many developers who can solve those kinds of problems, so I like to think I'm special. But all humans like to think that, so maybe I'm not actually a rockstar developer and I'm really just average-delusional. Who knows.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#62

Post by frostmatthew »

crazygringo wrote: post #57
frostmatthew wrote: post #45

Each time something like this is posted to HN many are quick to come to the defense of the 10x engineer as not a myth. Since so many HNers are founders/CEOs/CTOs/whatever I wonder how many of them making comments that 10x engineers are "responsible for most of team's output" are actually paying their "rockstar" engineers ten times average. The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of…

Because it's notoriously difficult to measure programmer productivity, companies are generally going to be incredibly hesitant to offer "rockstar" programmers salaries that match their capabilities. There's no box office take or album sales or stadium-filling metrics to rely on. "Rockstar" programmers generally need to go and (co-)found their own companies to make their multiples of millions. The great difficulty is…

That's another thing I've found funny...often the very same people who say measuring programmer productivity is difficult are the ones saying some devs are ten times more productive than others.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#63

Post by azakai »

> People love to say that a rockstar can do the work of 10 regular engineers. That's just nonsense. 9 women can't have one baby in a month, and 10 "rockstar" developers can't replace 100 regular ones.

This is completely unconvincing, and begs the question: why is software development a sequential fixed-time process like having a baby? Where is the evidence for that?

On the other side of things, there are lots of people - just look in the comments here and in previous related stories - of people that clearly say they have worked with devs that are 10x more productive then the average. Why does the author feel the need to deny that? That's the real question.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#64

Post by harel »

I never liked the words rockstar and programmer being associated together. The only valid use case for that is if a member of a very successful rock band, with fans and groupies becomes a programmer as a second job. Only then he's a rockstar programmer.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#65

Post by scarmig »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #37
bulatb wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the observation that kicked off the meme, a 10x engineer was someone who was 10x more productive than the least productive members of the team, not 10x more productive than the average.

Yeah. If the least productive member of the team is clueless and gets nothing done, then a competent programmer is literally infinitely more productive than that. It's not a very well-calibrated metric.

It's pretty typical, I'd say, for the least productive member of a set of 10 programmers to have negative productivity...

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#66

Post by jebblue »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #3

In the same vain I responded to Shanley's post: this is missing one type of engineer that is common in our field: * Average Engineer - Creates complex problems in response to simple problems... This is where the desire for rockstars / 10x engineers comes from. One person to clean up the mess made by 10 others.

Vain should be vein like vein or ore or artery.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#67

Post by skrebbel »

mtrimpe wrote: post #20
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #3

In the same vain I responded to Shanley's post: this is missing one type of engineer that is common in our field: * Average Engineer - Creates complex problems in response to simple problems... This is where the desire for rockstars / 10x engineers comes from. One person to clean up the mess made by 10 others.

That's exactly what I thought as well. I'd very much prefer having the 10x engineer meme replaced by that of the 0.1x engineer: the one that gets the same task done with 10% of the code and effort. The times I've felt by far most valuable is when I found a way to make that multi-month project simply obsolete by just changing a couple hundred lines of code in an unexpected place.

I've seen engineers with consistently negative productivity: solve 1 bug by introducing 2.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#68

Post by wslh »

yogo wrote: post #51
wslh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, is important to search the truth. I think we are discussing if 1 + 1 is equal to 2 or not. 10X engineers exist (I would say that 100X ones too). If you found even one it is enough to probe this fact. You can see similar distributions with scientists or other professionals.

With so much mention of 10x on HN I'm surprised Grant Cardone isn't on here or at tech conferences selling his book. That brings me to my point, a car salesman selling 10 times as much cars as other salesmen is clearly 10x, how do you determine that for a developer? To me it seems like there are so many variables that such a distinction would always be incorrect.

When I see a developer that can work on a complex product alone in short time and almost no bugs, well this a developer in the 10X league.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#69

Post by asabjorn »

dexen wrote: post #26

After reading numerous posts on the subject of 10x software engineers, I reckon they fall mostly into two categories: - `I have worked with / seen code of such ones' (often examples follow) - `there were no such ones on any team I ever managed' , with OP falling into this category. Which is to say, the existence (or absence) of 10x software engineers appears to be party recognition problem -- managers do not want to…

Agreed. And it is true 10x developers make complex problems disappear by realizing the code does not have to be written, by skipping intermediate steps, or by embracing the complexity if the problem and not code until the problem is understood instead of piling hack upon hack.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#70

Post by skrebbel »

I suspect that the strong disagreements between people on this thread on whether 10x engineers exist or not say more about the diversity of HN'er team composition than anything else.

If you put a competent coder among a bunch of not-entirely-stupid, well willing, but mediocre programmers, he can quickly be 10x as productive. He will also clearly stand out as such. Put the same coder among other competent coders, and nobody will notice anything special.

If this is true, there can only be two options:

    - Hanselman only ever worked with mediocre engineers
    - Hanselman only ever worked with truly competent engineers.
Hm. Given recent stories about Microsoft's employee quality downfall, something about my thesis must be wrong. That, or Microsoft really does mostly hire people in the rightmost quartile of a bell curve.

But anyway, no matter whether this idea makes sense, I believe that it never pays to try to hire "10x people". If you find that you managed to find one, it simply means that the most of your team has been underperforming. Get rid of them and replace by one or two other decent ones. Maybe the first mr 10x has some friends?

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