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Here's a question: Is Picasso a 10x artist? The thing about the 10x claim is that it takes something complex and creative and applies a scalar multiplier to it
by jhh 9y ago
Here's a question: Is Picasso a 10x artist?
The thing about the 10x claim is that it takes something complex and creative and applies a scalar multiplier to it.
Talking about 10x programmers is _semantically_ problematic.
- beagle3 9y agoProgramming is a craft, not an art. If programmer a satisfies the requirements 10 times faster than programmer b, and does so repeatedly, then programmer a is a 10x compared to b
- wruza 9y agoAbsolutely. We can even measure Picasso against other artists (e.g. in bucks per lifetime). 10x is not some internal state, it is a fusion of key performance indexes. If one doesn't have these though, then managing his company is pure art, by definition. Edit: grammar
- wruza 9y agoYou are highly probably 10x programmer asking it, because sometimes I get bored to death waiting on employees to perform a simple task, which is done by me on other OS 20 minutes ago. Sometimes I can't help but help them with "long-standing problem" by going into code and understanding how it works, making patch in few minutes. Am I rockstar? Pfft, no way. But the median is far lower than Picasso/10, it can be measured easily.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoIt's a self-serving mythology, because a few individuals can claim to be 10Xers to gain special privileges. It's telling that there's no such thing as industry talent matrix. Instead of general skills - creativity, accuracy, speed, debugging insight, ability to learn new languages/frameworks, team leadership, good-to-have-around vs toxic asshole, and so on - we have this myth of "the rockstar". A certain kind of management loves because rockstars because having them around reflects well on management (reason number one for hiring them) and supposedly they are super-productive (reason number two, which often turns out not to be true in practice, especially in a team setting.) The hiring process tests for almost none of the qualities on the talent matrix. There's a ridiculous notion that knowing algos makes you a developer worth talking to, and a slightly less ridiculous notion that a bit of hazing tells you something about how well someone works under pressure. The bottom line: that after all these decades we have far too little research defining the qualities that really matter in different work contexts, and almost no research at all into how to select for them.
- endorphone 9y agoIt's a self-serving mythology, because a few individuals can claim to be 10Xers to gain special privileges. Do people say "I'm a 10x programmer" and get promoted or some sort of perk? Get better jobs by saying that you're a rock star? Of course not. The premise of 10x programmers, outside of bloviating bloggers, is primarily one that people observe in programming teams. The "go to" person, the person who invariably initiates all of the important shifts and base designs, etc. Many projects start around such a person, they leave and it slowly rusts under a team of normal competency developers, who eventually all disperse and join another project started by a standout developer. My experience in this industry is that there are absolutely extreme exception developers, and thinking back I'd say it was about 1 out of every 100 developers in most orgs. They were the people who didn't need to be hand held, used heuristics to find solutions, developed designs that invariably became the kernel of solutions, etc. Other developers were critical in the mix, but the notion that all are the same is destructive and unrealistic.
- ja30278 9y agoThere's also a certain kind of person who seems to really want 10x people _not_ to exist. I'm not a 10x person, but I have worked with some. I don't think they are unique to programming..there are 10x folks in every field. Sometimes you don't need a 10x person, and if you don't, it can seem like they don't matter. In those cases, a few 1x people will do just as well. But I do believe that sometimes you _do_ need a 10x person, and if you do, you can't do the same things without them. In those cases, I'd absolutely take a 'toxic' 10x person over the nice-but-1x alternative. Part of the issue is that there's more work for programmers than ever, and most of that work is of the 1x variety.....if you're just banging out CSS for some small-business website, it doesn't matter whether you have Jeff Dean do it, or a new grad from Omaha Community college. If, however, you need to write a new globally consistent database abstraction at scale, then the new grad probably won't cut it. If you actually need that thing, then it wouldn't matter if the new grad was the nicest person on earth, and Jeff Dean the most 'toxic' (though actually I understand that he's a very nice person).
- tomcam 9y agoYes. He was hugely productive, far more than his peers. Same with Bach and Prince.
- psyc 9y agoI've always understood it as an approximate order of magnitude.
- marcosdumay 9y agoAn order of magnitude of what?
- Nomentatus 9y agoSee other replies vs measurement - and remember all the large software projects that never get deployed, becoming outright failures. Can you really conclude that they were problems nobody on earth could have solved?
- marcosdumay 9y agoI don't disagree you will see orders of magnitude differences between people by some measurement. The problem is that nobody defending it is specifying what measurement will yeld those orders of magnitude difference, and what is its relevance. Claiming a difference without telling in what dimension is an empty claim, and that is exactly the problem with the 10x developer idea. (By the way, yes, there are plenty of problems nobody on Earth could ever solve. That doesn't follow from the fact that easier projects fail, but it's not false either.)
- Nomentatus 9y agoThere isn't merely one vector in which superior programmers are superior, there are many; see the Feynman example. Your search for simplicity is misplaced, I believe. Nobody's said there aren't unsolvable problems, the question was whether nearly every massive failed software project (and they're common) represented such a thing - obviously no.
- Nomentatus 9y agoBut there are measures - debugging times, mirrored projects, skunk work small teams that smack down much larger official teams, etc.