5 ms·

The author has not ever worked with the truly 10x more productive programmers. Most people do not get the chance to work with these programmers. They do get pai

by rdouble 17y ago

The author has not ever worked with the truly 10x more productive programmers. Most people do not get the chance to work with these programmers. They do get paid in proportion to their productivity. There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad. I thought I was pretty good until I worked with the guy who made Winamp. It took me a couple weeks to make some enhancements to their add-ons site. It took him a couple weeks to write his own version of Pro Tools. I made 80 thousand dollars. He made 80 million dollars.

jey 17y ago
Justin Frankel is the doubly rare combination of being extremely skilled at programming and being able to leverage those skills to make tons of money. Most uber-programmers aren't so rich.
n-named 17y ago
Nullsoft was bought by AOL in June 1999 for US$80 million. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_2
- sfk 17y ago
  Interesting information. This was the time when the bubble was expanding rapidly. Anything got sold for $80 million in those days. I'm sure that Frankel is an excellent programmer, but this in no way an example that excellent programmers are generally rewarded according to their ability.
mattm 17y ago
How did he get that good?
- nostrademons 17y ago
  One guess: practice?
  - PostOnce 17y ago
    Practice will make you better, certainly, but different people learn at different speeds, and have different ceilings. Potential is not necessarily proportional to practice. So, what he may be able to do in a year may take you twenty, or a week. Practice isn't the only factor where ability is concerned.
    - zackattack 17y ago
      I'm skeptical. What evidence do you have for this? Maybe some people who have a better start (those who are "naturally" talented) receive better instruction, or are more inclined to practice more often.
      - rdouble 17y ago
        Programming ability is more like athletic ability than most people want to admit. Some guys just get better, faster. Some guys can't ever break certain plateaus, no matter how hard they try. In golf, it's probably possible for anyone to go from a duffer to a scratch golfer. But it might take 20 years of work for someone who isn't set up with the right natural gifts. Quality and amount of instruction and practice will determine some of the pace. But some people will just get it faster than others. And even "elite" golfers simply won't be as good as Tiger Woods, ever. I used to be a good skateboarder. There were guys I skated with who could learn the tricks 5 times faster than I could. I don't know why. We all skated the same amount... in fact, some of the guys who were better than me skated a lot less than I did. They just had something clicking that I didn't have. I'm a proponent of self-improvement. I think most average people can develop skills far and beyond what they give themselves credit for. I hate to be the guy who is arguing for mystical innate ability. However, it seems naive to claim that it doesn't exist. To end this comment on a useful note, the one thing I noticed both with the good skateboarders and the good programmers I know, is that they would 'go big' when practicing. the skaters would try something hard and figure it out until they got it. They wouldn't just sit around and do the same kickflip in a parking lot over and over again. Likewise, the good programmers I knew would always be seriously challenging themselves. For practice programs, they wouldn't just write a dumb fibonacci generator. They'd write a full blown throttling distributed network file copier, or a scheme compiler in postscript. Serious, hard projects for practice. Most programming is mundane and you can go for years without getting any better. The best guys I know are never complacent with doing the same boring shit all day - they'd always challenge themselves.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "How did he get that good?" Ask Justin? Maybe someone here who knows him can ask him and post the reply, oeven better, ask him to post. Once of the reasons I enjoyed "Coders At work" was that this question in (at least implicitly) answered by some great programmers.
walkon 17y ago
"There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad." So someone who is 10x more productive then their coworker isn't actually 10x more productive because their coworker is so horrible? Isn't "10x more productive" an explicit measure of productivity relative to the guy(s) next to you?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- scott_s 17y ago
  He meant in the class of 10x better than the average programmer, which would include all developers in the world, not just the few you can see.
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    Why would the developers you couldn't see be 10x better than the developers you can see? Could there be a dark matter halo of great programmers lurking around the world's mediocre-programmer-filled corporate cubicals?
    - scott_s 17y ago
      I meant "the developers you can see" to imply the people around you. That's a small sample size, and not representative of the entire world.
      - joe_the_user 17y ago
        A small sample size would just imply greater deviation. There's no reason to assume the programmers outside your sample would be x10 better than those in your sample.
        17y ago
jxcole 17y ago
It might be true that you are only 10 times better than the guy sitting next to you because he is 10 times worse than you, but this is something of a red herring. There are plenty of terrible programmers out there who are 10 times worse than me. Do I get paid 10x more than them? Not even close. This article is more about why a 10x productivity increase does not equate to a 10x pay increase than it is about the possible existence of programmers who are 100s, 1000s, or 10,000s times better than the worst possible programmer.
- sorbits 17y ago
  Try time the clerks in your local supermarket, I am sure you can find one which is twice as fast as the slowest, should he or she get twice the salary? When it comes to programming there are relatively many bad programmers hired (on a base salary). Maybe the good programmers are underpaid, but definitely the bad programmers are overpaid. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that programmers are generally bad at negotiating their own salary.
joe_the_user 17y ago
Hmm, I remember using Gnutella back in the day. It was horribly buggy and slow. Maybe Frankel didn't write that one or maybe being satisfying things half-working was the secret to x100 productivity.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  I used Gnutella too. It was horribly buggy and slow. However, remember that they wrote it in a weekend, and what it was attempting to do really was pretty revolutionary. Even brilliant programmers can only accomplish so much in a weekend.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
umjames 17y ago
What was his version of Pro Tools called? I'm curious, that's all.
- tjr 17y ago
  http://www.reaper.fm/ http://www.reaper.fm/
elai 17y ago
I think this comparison is a bit unfair. The guy who made Winamp had significant experience in creating audio related programs. Winamp had a lot of audio tweaking/editing-like features also. By taking his investment of knowledge about audio programming, he saved a significant amount of time in recreating something similar with his pro tools v0.0.1. I wouldn't be surprised if he copied a good chunk of code from winamp too. Also he was starting from square one. It might take me a few weeks to make enhancements to some add on website I'm unfamiliar with using clunky web tech fighting with a badly architectured framework, while it would take me a day to make the same thing with a concise and elegant API starting from scratch. Later on I might become faster in changing the website. It's like a phd physicist talking about how that math phd clobbered him in an analytics course, when really he just had more invested. Or as the article says: "“Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before."

by rdouble 17y ago

jey 17y ago

Justin Frankel is the doubly rare combination of being extremely skilled at programming and being able to leverage those skills to make tons of money. Most uber-programmers aren't so rich.

n-named 17y ago

Nullsoft was bought by AOL in June 1999 for US$80 million. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_2

sfk 17y ago
Interesting information. This was the time when the bubble was expanding rapidly. Anything got sold for $80 million in those days. I'm sure that Frankel is an excellent programmer, but this in no way an example that excellent programmers are generally rewarded according to their ability.

mattm 17y ago

How did he get that good?

nostrademons 17y ago
One guess: practice?
- PostOnce 17y ago
  Practice will make you better, certainly, but different people learn at different speeds, and have different ceilings. Potential is not necessarily proportional to practice. So, what he may be able to do in a year may take you twenty, or a week. Practice isn't the only factor where ability is concerned.
  - zackattack 17y ago
    I'm skeptical. What evidence do you have for this? Maybe some people who have a better start (those who are "naturally" talented) receive better instruction, or are more inclined to practice more often.
    - rdouble 17y ago
      Programming ability is more like athletic ability than most people want to admit. Some guys just get better, faster. Some guys can't ever break certain plateaus, no matter how hard they try. In golf, it's probably possible for anyone to go from a duffer to a scratch golfer. But it might take 20 years of work for someone who isn't set up with the right natural gifts. Quality and amount of instruction and practice will determine some of the pace. But some people will just get it faster than others. And even "elite" golfers simply won't be as good as Tiger Woods, ever. I used to be a good skateboarder. There were guys I skated with who could learn the tricks 5 times faster than I could. I don't know why. We all skated the same amount... in fact, some of the guys who were better than me skated a lot less than I did. They just had something clicking that I didn't have. I'm a proponent of self-improvement. I think most average people can develop skills far and beyond what they give themselves credit for. I hate to be the guy who is arguing for mystical innate ability. However, it seems naive to claim that it doesn't exist. To end this comment on a useful note, the one thing I noticed both with the good skateboarders and the good programmers I know, is that they would 'go big' when practicing. the skaters would try something hard and figure it out until they got it. They wouldn't just sit around and do the same kickflip in a parking lot over and over again. Likewise, the good programmers I knew would always be seriously challenging themselves. For practice programs, they wouldn't just write a dumb fibonacci generator. They'd write a full blown throttling distributed network file copier, or a scheme compiler in postscript. Serious, hard projects for practice. Most programming is mundane and you can go for years without getting any better. The best guys I know are never complacent with doing the same boring shit all day - they'd always challenge themselves.
plinkplonk 17y ago
"How did he get that good?" Ask Justin? Maybe someone here who knows him can ask him and post the reply, oeven better, ask him to post. Once of the reasons I enjoyed "Coders At work" was that this question in (at least implicitly) answered by some great programmers.

walkon 17y ago

"There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad." So someone who is 10x more productive then their coworker isn't actually 10x more productive because their coworker is so horrible? Isn't "10x more productive" an explicit measure of productivity relative to the guy(s) next to you?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
scott_s 17y ago
He meant in the class of 10x better than the average programmer, which would include all developers in the world, not just the few you can see.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Why would the developers you couldn't see be 10x better than the developers you can see? Could there be a dark matter halo of great programmers lurking around the world's mediocre-programmer-filled corporate cubicals?
  - scott_s 17y ago
    I meant "the developers you can see" to imply the people around you. That's a small sample size, and not representative of the entire world.
    - joe_the_user 17y ago
      A small sample size would just imply greater deviation. There's no reason to assume the programmers outside your sample would be x10 better than those in your sample.
      - 17y ago

jxcole 17y ago

It might be true that you are only 10 times better than the guy sitting next to you because he is 10 times worse than you, but this is something of a red herring. There are plenty of terrible programmers out there who are 10 times worse than me. Do I get paid 10x more than them? Not even close. This article is more about why a 10x productivity increase does not equate to a 10x pay increase than it is about the possible existence of programmers who are 100s, 1000s, or 10,000s times better than the worst possible programmer.

sorbits 17y ago
Try time the clerks in your local supermarket, I am sure you can find one which is twice as fast as the slowest, should he or she get twice the salary? When it comes to programming there are relatively many bad programmers hired (on a base salary). Maybe the good programmers are underpaid, but definitely the bad programmers are overpaid. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that programmers are generally bad at negotiating their own salary.

joe_the_user 17y ago

Hmm, I remember using Gnutella back in the day. It was horribly buggy and slow. Maybe Frankel didn't write that one or maybe being satisfying things half-working was the secret to x100 productivity.

nostrademons 17y ago
I used Gnutella too. It was horribly buggy and slow. However, remember that they wrote it in a weekend, and what it was attempting to do really was pretty revolutionary. Even brilliant programmers can only accomplish so much in a weekend.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

umjames 17y ago

What was his version of Pro Tools called? I'm curious, that's all.

tjr 17y ago
http://www.reaper.fm/ http://www.reaper.fm/

elai 17y ago

I think this comparison is a bit unfair. The guy who made Winamp had significant experience in creating audio related programs. Winamp had a lot of audio tweaking/editing-like features also. By taking his investment of knowledge about audio programming, he saved a significant amount of time in recreating something similar with his pro tools v0.0.1. I wouldn't be surprised if he copied a good chunk of code from winamp too. Also he was starting from square one. It might take me a few weeks to make enhancements to some add on website I'm unfamiliar with using clunky web tech fighting with a badly architectured framework, while it would take me a day to make the same thing with a concise and elegant API starting from scratch. Later on I might become faster in changing the website. It's like a phd physicist talking about how that math phd clobbered him in an analytics course, when really he just had more invested. Or as the article says: "“Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before."