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I agree that pulling it off requires help. That said, I've seen it happen where folks turn a (should be) 1 day task into a 10 day project. That's 10x more pro

• 1123581321 10y ago
  Sure, I understand the gist of what you're saying (and what the parent comment was saying.) But the example doesn't work. Programmers at a consultancy/agency are probably billing 20-40 hours no matter what. So if someone spends 80 hours on an 8 hour project, that just means they didn't work on other projects. This impacts cashflow. Additionally, an inflated bill may be challenged and marked down. So, there's no way for a programmer to be 10x more profitable unless they had nothing else to do otherwise. Now, a company can be 10x more profitable if they hire enough programmers so that they have the capacity to inflate every project. ;) To be a 10x programmer at a consultancy, you need a combination of a high billing rate and long hours, but the easiest way is to implement a productized service that is billed by value/fixed price instead of hourly. For example, I know someone whose company was paid $81,000 for him to build an application, but he made a lot more for them charging about $40,000 to re-implement the same thing over and over for other customers. He didn't hit 10x, but he contributed mid six figure revenue in a year whereas the $81,000 was paid over 18 months. Obviously, he couldn't have done this if he was inflating his time.