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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

#91

Post by 1337shadow »

prostheticvamp wrote: post #83
m0zg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> not so smart that you’re just lost when talking to them That, BTW, is a sure sign that someone is trying to appear smarter than they really are. Having worked at 2 research labs over the course of my career I know more than my fair share of genius-level people. Without fail, they are humble about it, and can explain complex concepts in a way the rest of us can understand. This is something that just blows my mind…

As Feynman said: you don’t really understand a subject until you can explain it to your grandfather.

And that's how I explained the cloud to my grandma: the company buys big daddy servers which make baby computers that the company sells for profit. She was so happy she finally understood what my job was at the time.

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

#92

Post by lonelappde »

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…

Solving suduko is a college homework assignment. Norvig's solution is simple and quick, but he spent decades dedicating his entire professional life to studying all manner of AI, so it's not clear his overall problem solving speed is.hifh including the time spent on past study. In the meantime he wasn't learning to be good at kernel hacking or UI development.

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

#93

Post by corporateslave5 »

duaoebg wrote: post #90
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…

I'm easily 10x a good programmer, probably more. It's all I do, it's all I'll ever do. I'm not a balanced person and I'm ok with that.

Yeah I can commiserate. Aside from going out here and there, social outings, I’m pretty much always programming or reading about programming. I have zero other hobbies and don’t want any.

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

#94

Post by pjc50 »

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…

I've certainly worked with them - someone who wrote an entire h265 decoder test suite in three months, for example. My own experience had included times of being the 10x debugger, especially when called into situations that have already consumed a large amount of colleagues time.

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

#95

Post by lonelappde »

t0astbread wrote: post #55
closeparen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication overhead is expensive. All else being equal, it’s much better to build a small elite team that can operate successfully with less structure and process, rather than a large average one.

Right. But you can't build a functioning team that works together and can rely on each other by fostering a culture of competition and hiring only the "predestined" 10x engineers. If the team culture is to help each other, forgive mistakes and learn from each other without measuring who's the best the team will automatically build itself without the need to hire only "10x engineers". Or so I suppose. I'm not an HR pe…

Your dream team is great, missing only a 10x person to lead them, inventing MapReduce or MacOS or AWS.

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

#96

Post by corporateslave5 »

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’ve gotten solving a sudoku puzzle as an interview question, to be implemented in full in 45 mins.

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

#97

Post by overgard »

I agree with the article, but I also think it leaves out something fairly important, which is minimizing huge time sinks. Instead of being 10x better, how can you reduce wasted time 10x?

I remember working with this one guy that was light years smarter than me, but if you watched him use the IDE it was painful. He did everything in the menus, slowly. How much of his life could he have back from memorizing f5 and a couple other shortcuts?

Maybe you could reduce waste in various ways:

* Learn keyboard shortcuts instead of pecking through menus

* Use search instead of browsing (especially with keyboard shortcuts!)

* Have you ever lost half a day debugging something that turned out to be dumb? (I have!) Is there a way to modify your coding style or your testing habits so you never hit that again?

* Do you know your stack well enough that (given the time) you could reimplement the same ideas yourself? (Or is it a magic box that you can't debug? How much time and effort do you spend prodding the magic box?)

* Have you automated all the manual things you currently do?

* Are you wasting a lot of time dealing with bad abstractions when something much more basic would suffice?

* Are you mastering your tools/languages/frameworks, or are you switching around so often that you spend a lot of time looking things up?

* Do you have input into how your tasks are written, or are you stuck with whatever breakdown someone else came up with? Is your work getting awkwardly twisted to fit into these milestones? Can you work out a better system with your leads?

That's the tip of the ice berg -- I think if you look at almost anything you do, you can generally find some aspect of it that's cumbersome and wasting your time. I feel like when you account for wasted effort/time, and removing it, becoming "10x" starts to seem a lot more reasonable -- it's not about being a genius, it's about being introspective and careful about how you perform your work. It saddens me to say this, but I think that sort of introspection is rare. I see so many programmers doing uncomfortable awkward things every day, because it's only like 10 extra seconds, except those 10 seconds times 20 times a day times a year and now that cost is out of control

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

#98

Post by Aeolun »

dangus wrote: post #79
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…

I don't think that is unfair. It’s perfectly acceptable to be a 3x developer.

What bothers me is the people that are happy to be a <1 developer. Or even a <0 developer, whose benefit to the team is net negative.

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

#99

Post by james_s_tayler »

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 wrote: post #33

I remember one programmer that I characterised with "He writes a lot of code". I ended up with one of his not small routines that I replaced with a one page assembler routine in MVS NIP rather than OPEN. When reworking printing software to support multi color, I researched a commonly used subroutine though several layers of calls and replaced it with, yes, a single character constant. I lost count of the many legacy…

10x is also about quality. Not raw output. A lot of times the really fast devs are fast because they don't stop to consider how they can do things in a fundamentally much better way, they just churn out the status quo as fast as possible. Those type are not 10x.

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

#100

Post by wvenable »

amznthrowaway5 wrote: post #5

> highly productive developers (10x or otherwise) are problem-solving at a much higher level This is a very important point, but calling these highly productive developers "10x" doesn't really make sense. They are more like "infinity times" compared to the average when it comes to getting a difficult task done, since the average developer would just get stuck and never be able to invent good designs and solve the dif…

Oh no, these other programmers get the task done but they use 10x the amount of code to do it and nobody can figure it out. It mostly works too, except on Tuesday's when it's raining.
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