> Experienced programmers recognize what's happening and have the personality to stand up the project leader and get a simplified version of the requirements ac

> Experienced programmers recognize what's happening and have the personality to stand up the project leader and get a simplified version of the requirements accepted. Some years ago I was tasked with taking a program and fixing a major bug and adding a new feature. The original devs were gone, the code base was a mix of spaghetti code and a large number of design pattern layers. I brought up rewriting it but was told no, absolutely not. After thrashing around the code for a while longer I rewrote it anyway, taking the requirements from our actual usage in production plus the desired new feature, and was done in short order with about 1/4 the LOC of the original. A lot of supposed requirements fell on the floor, but none of them were being used and some of them never belonged in that particular program at all. For someone like me, a "normal" programmer, this is the only way to achieve bursts of 10x productivity. At that same job there was another like-minded person I collaborated with. As a nuts and bolts dev I was as good or better than he was, but his ability to cut to the chase and somehow convince management was almost magical. 10x doesn't come from typing in code very quickly on sub-tasks.