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10x programmers exist, but often it doesn’t matter. The only way one programmer is 10x better than the median of a team of solidly educated peers is in the ver

10x programmers exist, but often it doesn’t matter. The only way one programmer is 10x better than the median of a team of solidly educated peers is in the very few extraordinarally difficult problems that require something like real genius. If there’s someone on a team doing 10x more average code than his or her peers it’s by avoiding other work that isn’t being tracked as carefully. Also, people who write less new code than others are often contributing above average on things like writing bug reports and doing thorough code reviews. FWIW I’m basing this mostly on real data from a multi year project.

rhapsodic 8y ago
> If there’s someone on a team doing 10x more average code than his or her peers it’s by avoiding other work that isn’t being tracked as carefully. You can't possibly know that for a fact. Oh, and "someone on a team doing 10x more average code than his or her peers" is not what 10x programmer refers to.
- ljw1001 8y ago
  I dumped the database of the bug-tracking and code review systems we used, and analyzed those, by developer, matching them up to the same kind of deep analysis of subversion commits i used to look at coding productivity. This was a 5 year project with something like 60 devs. So yeah, I can know that. BTW, if you think I can know that, you also seem to think that it's ok to say someone is 10X better than someone else at something that can't be measured.
- std_throwaway 8y ago
  > You can't possibly know that for a fact. That's the nature of this beast.
std_throwaway 8y ago
Probably because that project is just a lot of average difficulty work that has to be done. Did your project ever run into obstacles where >50% of the previous work had to be thrown out?
- ljw1001 8y ago
  Nearly all projects are just a lot of average difficulty work, by the definition of the word average.

rhapsodic 8y ago

> If there’s someone on a team doing 10x more average code than his or her peers it’s by avoiding other work that isn’t being tracked as carefully. You can't possibly know that for a fact. Oh, and "someone on a team doing 10x more average code than his or her peers" is not what 10x programmer refers to.

ljw1001 8y ago
I dumped the database of the bug-tracking and code review systems we used, and analyzed those, by developer, matching them up to the same kind of deep analysis of subversion commits i used to look at coding productivity. This was a 5 year project with something like 60 devs. So yeah, I can know that. BTW, if you think I can know that, you also seem to think that it's ok to say someone is 10X better than someone else at something that can't be measured.
std_throwaway 8y ago
> You can't possibly know that for a fact. That's the nature of this beast.

std_throwaway 8y ago

Probably because that project is just a lot of average difficulty work that has to be done. Did your project ever run into obstacles where >50% of the previous work had to be thrown out?

ljw1001 8y ago
Nearly all projects are just a lot of average difficulty work, by the definition of the word average.