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I thought the perceived idea about the 10x developer was that he/she is 10x better than the average programmer, not the worst That could well be what people pe

I thought the perceived idea about the 10x developer was that he/she is 10x better than the average programmer, not the worst That could well be what people perceive. It's not what the studies said. While the article has some good references, I might as well quote Peopleware again just for the fun of it. I churn this out every so often: A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance. The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work. Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

michaelmrose 10y ago
10x the worst literally means nothing at all if you find a sufficiently bad programmer you can have an infinity times programmer and the 10x developer as it is normally expressed is 10x average. Further author even punts at the end of article by claiming that its not needed to measure difficult to measure things as we can instead reason our way to the right answer which is practically nonsensical. Measuring is step one in actually reasoning about things. In short author may be a good developer but he is certainly not a 10x author.
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kybernetikos 10y ago
> you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5 This is roughly what I estimate the productivity improvement a good developer gets when they're working on a task that fascinates them and that they choose for themselves, and without too many dependencies on productivity killing things (like builds and flaky external libraries and services). The most productive people I knew tended to the people who didn't do as they were told. They were amazingly productive at producing the things that fascinated them, much less productive at the drudge that the organisation demanded of them. Sometimes the organisation was able to recognise that they were doing useful stuff (despite the fact that they weren't always pulling their weight on the things they were supposed to be doing) and they became rockstars, sometimes it wasn't and they became pariahs.

michaelmrose 10y ago

10x the worst literally means nothing at all if you find a sufficiently bad programmer you can have an infinity times programmer and the 10x developer as it is normally expressed is 10x average. Further author even punts at the end of article by claiming that its not needed to measure difficult to measure things as we can instead reason our way to the right answer which is practically nonsensical. Measuring is step one in actually reasoning about things. In short author may be a good developer but he is certainly not a 10x author.

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kybernetikos 10y ago

> you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5 This is roughly what I estimate the productivity improvement a good developer gets when they're working on a task that fascinates them and that they choose for themselves, and without too many dependencies on productivity killing things (like builds and flaky external libraries and services). The most productive people I knew tended to the people who didn't do as they were told. They were amazingly productive at producing the things that fascinated them, much less productive at the drudge that the organisation demanded of them. Sometimes the organisation was able to recognise that they were doing useful stuff (despite the fact that they weren't always pulling their weight on the things they were supposed to be doing) and they became rockstars, sometimes it wasn't and they became pariahs.