5 ms·
The 10xer isn't a 10xer because they work 80-hour weeks but because they produce relatively more output of a relatively higher quality in a given time frame, by
by not-a-10xer 11y ago
The 10xer isn't a 10xer because they work 80-hour weeks but because they produce relatively more output of a relatively higher quality in a given time frame, by as much as an order of magnitude, or at least that's how I understand it.
For example, Linus Torvalds wrote git in a month and in the process effectively dug the grave of svn, a project into which thousands of man-hours had already been sunk.
The "10xers don't exist" meme supports the notion that programmers are interchangeable cogs and justifies the ~$130k salary ceiling we run into without going into management.
- mattmanser 11y agoI think you're mistaking how easy it is to write a program from scratch when you have nothing in your way (once you have some experience, before that writing a program from scratch is really hard). Maintenance becomes ever more complicated and hard as time goes on because the complexity of the bugs goes up by orders of magnitude as does the complexity of the code. I've spent more time adding a very minor bit of functionality to a system I wrote 5 years ago than I did writing the whole thing in the first place. Because it grows and adding new code or modifying existing code becomes more and more expensive. How many man-hours have gone in to git now? And it's not as if git is that great anyway, we all know how bad the UX is for example and all the man hours that have gone in to masking that problem, it's just better than SVN.
- jules 11y agoLinus could have chosen to work on improving SVN instead, but he did not. The decision to write a new version control system in the first place is part of what makes makes him so much more effective, not just pure programming ability.