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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

#71

Post by thoman23 »

paublyrne wrote: post #20
liamcardenas wrote: post #11

Why wouldn’t there be such thing as a 10x programmer? Is the average programmer so good? There are outliers in every industry. Professional athletes are a clear example — they are often many orders of magnitude better than the average player of their respective sport. There are probably also a few 100x engineers, maybe someone like Elon.

The equivalent comparison would be professional athletes at the top of their sport to other professional athletes in that sport working or playing in a lower league. Would the the top performers be 10x the other ones? Hard to quantify this, but I'd say no, more like 2x or at most 3x

All you have to do is look at someone like LeBron. He single-handedly makes a team a championship contender.

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

#72

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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 comes from terrible "corporate drone" software developers in the 80s and 90s - the ones that would takes weeks to developer simple routines.

Ironically, a lot of the 0.1X engineers I've worked with in the 2010s were the most technically competent. Obsession with cutting-edge tools and being technically correct over shipping quickly can sink a person's productivity.

They're the people leading the charge to rewrite the front-end in Vue after we already rewrote it in React when Angular fell out of style. Or rewriting the backend in Rust because Golang isn't trendy any more. Or refactoring the backend for months to increase test coverage from 93% to 95%.

My personal indicator of a 10X programmer is someone who knows when and how to trade off technical debt against speed of execution. A brilliant engineer with all of the knowledge in the world can still sink a team by working on the wrong things all the time.

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

#73

Post by 1996 »

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.

Yes -- but you shouldn't state the truth because it makes every non-top programmer feel bad :-)

I have another similar funny example - whoever invented bitcoin, that person single handledly created more value than all the YC startups put together PLUS a lot of other incubators, plus a lot of other companies. I wouldn't be surprised if in less than 10 years, you could add to that the total capitalization of the FANG (as in F+A+N+G) and still that one person will have had created more value -- alone.

It takes some special persons, who have not just the wits, but A) know extremely well one or more domains that are generally not connected - say software, finance and game theory for Bitcoin, or software development, project coordination of thousands of persons and hundreds of companies, and scale/complexity issues for Linus B) has already played with the existing solutions quite a bit and know why they suck C) has the opportunity (free time, etc) to scratch this own itch.

I know, people will often tell how it's wrong, how both project are special exception, but then what about Fabrice Bellard? What about the many others? Are they all special exceptions?

TLDR: I believe Kx programmers have a statistic distribution with a very long tail. There are some K=10, some K=50, some with a K even larger. It requires multiple skills + motive + opportunity. Any missing factor and the magic doesn't happen.

Deny the existence of the 10x programmers if it makes you feel better about yourself. Use their existence as a source of inspiration if you want to improve yourself.

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

#74

Post by thoman23 »

A few people have touched on it here, but I'll add my voice. I firmly believe that there are programmers who are better described as a "1 vs. 0" programmer. Some programmers have a creative talent in them that leads them to create elegant solutions that literally a team of 50 average programmers would not.

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

#75

Post by chillacy »

petilon wrote: post #49

10x programmers do exist. But here's the thing: its not worth being a 10x programmer. Managers don't necessarily want them. First of all, if you complete a project 10x faster than the expected time, managers will assume that they had overestimated the project, as opposed to recognizing that you're a 10x programmer. I have seen this time after time after time. Secondly, if a manager does recognize that you're a 10x pr…

There are companies programmers are the ones doing the estimating, project managers hold them accountable, and managers dish out promotions and convey priorities.

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

#76

Post by catalogia »

Nition wrote: post #29
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…

Not to diminish the achievement, but worth noting I think that RollerCoaster Tycoon was based on his earlier Transport Tycoon engine, so at least he did get to split the work up between two projects. I have a personal theory the that the average 10x programmer is say 2.5x smarter than average, but also 4x more focused on work, netting a 2.5x4=10x total when you remove all the procrastination and general fumbling arou…

The praise given to him for Rollercoaster Tycoon could easily also be given to him for Transport Tycoon, which was also a great game. The community really took it to amazing heights with OpenTTD, but the original was great.

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

#77

Post by jimbokun »

mjw1007 wrote: post #60
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 very good, but I think the sudoku webpage is presenting a finished program in an idealised way, not recording the process he used to write it, false starts and all. (It seems likely to me that there were some false starts, because eliminate() returns either `values` or False, when both of its callers would be just as happy if it returned True or False.)

He didn't give an implementation time for the sudoku solver, but he did say he completed the spell checker in a single transcontinental flight.

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

#78

Post by rubber_duck »

headmelted wrote: post #25
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…

Agreed. I've never encountered someone that I think is genuinely a 10x programmer. I've worked with a few people that thought I was one, which I'm most certainly not, and I've explained that to them. I've encountered a lot of what I would call .2x programmers though. As you've said, there are a lot of people that are really bad at the job. It's not a slight either - there are a lot of people doing this job that reall…

The only guy I would describe as a "10x" wasn't exceptionally technical or a genius - I saw him as above average, but I've worked with guys that I thought were more exceptional in those regards.

But this guy had the ability to focus on the most mundane things with unbelievable attention and focus - I would probably need to take amphetamines or something to come close to this level. Combined with the experience he had with this project he was by far the most productive person on the team (and the team had competent developers on it).

And it was not a case of a mad genius locking people in to his asylum project - this project was screwed over by that type of developer years before he joined the team.

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

#79

Post by dangus »

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 be seen as unfair to the rest of the employees who want to live a balanced life.

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