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There's an implication later that he might have been 10x because he was cutting other people down – turn everyone else into a 0.1x developer and the 1x develope

There's an implication later that he might have been 10x because he was cutting other people down – turn everyone else into a 0.1x developer and the 1x developer starts looking good. I'd take that claim skeptically. But another consideration is that more than half of a team's work isn't code. You have to write the right thing, not just something, and that requires time and communication. So he might have been a 10x coder and a 0.1x communicator – indeed since he seemed to have little interest in interpersonal relations, some amount of his performance may have been due to his own time allocation choices. Two of those people together would perform very poorly on some projects. And very well on others, depending on the clarity of the project and the amount of technical challenge it presented.

crpatino 10y ago
In my current job, I have to deal with once certain 10x programmer with... how to put it charitably... some distinct lack of social graces. He's better than everybody else but not 10x better, also, he does not make everyone 10x dumber, thought there's some rework that everyone has to do to accomodate his demands. I have come to believe that about half of his enhanced productivity is simply that he's a rock star and management tolerates him (but not everyone else) cut the red tape. In general, every commit has to bee peer reviewed, but he just jumps and ninja edits the code base at leisure. Everybody is supposed to run regressions before commiting, but from time to time, things will stop working and it will be some of his transactions behind it (which is discovered after multiple people could not do any productive work for half a day, trying to figure out what when wrong with their own work instead). If some tool or another is suboptimal, he will just roll out his own and be done with it (leaving the rest of the team to learn how to work with his prefered tools, instead). Fortunatelly, we have other very strong developers that act as counterweight to him. Unfortunatelly, they also come with their own quirks of character and you are bonded to run into one of their pet issues from time to time.

crpatino 10y ago

In my current job, I have to deal with once certain 10x programmer with... how to put it charitably... some distinct lack of social graces. He's better than everybody else but not 10x better, also, he does not make everyone 10x dumber, thought there's some rework that everyone has to do to accomodate his demands. I have come to believe that about half of his enhanced productivity is simply that he's a rock star and management tolerates him (but not everyone else) cut the red tape. In general, every commit has to bee peer reviewed, but he just jumps and ninja edits the code base at leisure. Everybody is supposed to run regressions before commiting, but from time to time, things will stop working and it will be some of his transactions behind it (which is discovered after multiple people could not do any productive work for half a day, trying to figure out what when wrong with their own work instead). If some tool or another is suboptimal, he will just roll out his own and be done with it (leaving the rest of the team to learn how to work with his prefered tools, instead). Fortunatelly, we have other very strong developers that act as counterweight to him. Unfortunatelly, they also come with their own quirks of character and you are bonded to run into one of their pet issues from time to time.