>You've heard of the mythical 10x programmers, programmers who can produce ten times as much as us normal humans. I'll repeat what I've said before on the "10X

>You've heard of the mythical 10x programmers, programmers who can produce ten times as much as us normal humans. I'll repeat what I've said before on the "10X" label which causes so many arguments... To make peace with the "10x" label, I suggest people just think of it as a figure-of-speech instead of a rigorous mathematical term. We don't get hung up when people say "Star Wars IV was ten times better than Phantom Menace" or "I'm not even 1/2 the football player I used to be." Even if people were to use a new term such as "3-Sigma Programmer"[1] instead of "10X Programmer", the ensuing debates would still be the same. E.g. "Some people say 3-σ programmers write string parsing loops that are better in speed and quality than 99.7% of the other loops but that 3-standard-deviations-above-the-mean is a myth... etc" Argument pattern is the same: take a label, any label, hyperfocus on some literal meaning to the exclusion of all else and debate why that mathematical interpretation fails in the real world. You can interpret the label(s) literally as math or as an English meme. I propose that one of those interpretations will keep your blood pressure from rising. As a counterpoint to the article, if a programmer knows how to convert a Ruby program with 100 lines and rewrites it in C/C++ in 600 lines so it executes 15x faster and uses less memory so the company can better utilize densely packed virtual machines in a cloud deployment, that's what many would call a "10x programmer" even though none of the inputs & outputs are mathematically "10" anywhere. The programmer wrote more lines of code so that another metric of effectiveness was optimized. The LOC increased but that's irrelevant. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation