9 ms·

Alan Cooper on the “10x” Programmer

114 points by jamessun 7y ago

mikece 7y ago
There will always be outliers but it really depends what thing the 10x programmer is making ten times more of. If it's simply lines of code then it can strongly be argued that he's creating 10x more technical debt as well, as one of the stories suggests. I've read that many outlier programmers are on the moderate-to-advanced portion of the autistic scale, at a place where it's actually a superpower in terms of being able to concentrate and write massive amounts of code and usually very good quality. The biggest problem with devs like that is that their colleages/teammates have a hard time keeping up with them and management usually tries to coerce others to try to catch up and not treat them like the benevolent freak they are. Even if there's no conflict with a high quality 10x performer there's also the future case problem of trying to figure out how to fill the shoes of such a dev if/when they leave. Management will never authorize hiring 10 people to replace that person, and unless the person was writing perfect code your maintenance is usually a lot more than your staff can handle as well. Are there other fields/jobs where someone can consistently produce 10x more than others simply on their own ability?
- codingslave 7y ago
  I agree with this, for anyone to be a 10x developer, most likely their brain has massive deficiencies in other areas of functioning. I've only worked with one 10x developer in my life. After seeing his code and problem solving abilities, I started to question whether I was any good at coding at all (and I am regularly regarded as the best on my team). Finance is another industry that supports 10x employees, its common for traders with a natural ability at pattern recognition to produce 10x - 100x returns. Like technology, their minds can be leveraged by increasing the amount of capital they can manage.
- yarg 7y ago
  The spectrum guys are good for deep dives and best operating practice based implementation, not so much on branching code and creativity.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  > Are there other fields/jobs where someone can consistently produce 10x more than others simply on their own ability? Sales. Some people can make it rain and generally nobody begrudges paying them well to do so.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Fiction or non-fiction writing. The difference between Terry Brooks and the average wannabe fantasy author is enormous and the difference between him and JRR Tolkien is greater again. Mathematics. Terence Tao is as far ahead of the average Math professor as they are of the average high school Math teacher. Law. If you give the average lawyer twenty times as much time and all the research resources of a partner at Skadden Arps the Skadden guy will still come out on top. Finance. Whether you’re talking VC, PE or Hedge Funds the people at the top are a lot more than ten times as good as the average, never mind the marginal member of their reference class. All of academia as far as research is concerned. Research impact as measured by citations is a power law. People at top departments routinely get hundreds of times the citations of those at no name ones. In any human endeavour that isn’t limited by severe bottlenecks in material input you get people who can do much more with much less than others can, and who are capable of doing things that those less skilled simply can’t do.
    - rightbyte 7y ago
      Add carpentry or vehicle technician to that list. All jobs where you have some sort of choice on how and what to do and motoric aptitude leads to high variance in skills. The big difference is maybe that bad vehicle technicians are singled out by the boss or customers and quit? While neither the boss or customer can pinpoint a single programmer.
      - tuesdayrain 7y ago
        I think this boils down to literally any arbitrary skill based activity. Unless the output is heavily dependent on RNG, there will always be someone who is orders of magnitude better than the average person.
- yarg 7y ago
  One other thing, software has the benefit that product development occurs in a simulation. There's a freedom that comes with that, we're unbound by physics - layer upon layer of abstraction make it a lost concern. It feeds into itself, growing in power at a rate proportional to its surface. Until that is, it collapses under its own weight. When that happens is a matter of structure, and the extent to which the developer understands what the structure is, where it should be and how it must expand to cater for new requirements. For simple cases a single largely linear block of code will be fine. Eventually things get more complex. You'll need to move the lower level functionality to another file and call through to its methods. Some of the methods in these files will become so heavily parameterised - and with repeat parameters - that you might want to introduce state. Welcome to OOP. Then with the proliferation of the files you've created you'll need to introduce a directory structure. Then a module structure. Then a separation of API and implementations. Then a division across projects. At any of these points some will falter. Some can't even write a single class without copying a pasting massive blocks of code. Some write class after class without consideration of abstraction or structure. Yes there are 10x developers - those who understand structure and can implement the code accordingly. Why does this happen in software and not other industries? As I said, we're unbound by reality. If the best of us were engineers, we would be more tightly constrained by the physical limitations of the world. If the worst of us were engineers, they would get people killed.
  - ed312 7y ago
    You've described how I feel about this in such a succinct yet expressive way. I find it hard to communicate to ${NON_PROGRAMMERS} the difference between highly skilled software folks, average skilled, and the huge bulk of copy+paste wannabe's.
TheOperator 7y ago
>The 10x programmer is essentially a libertarian concept: That is, they do it all by themselves because they don’t recognize how much is done for them by others. I'm finding myself meeting a lot of "10x" descriptors. I'm not doing 10x the work but I'm definitely doing the work of the next two highest performing colleagues put together. I also see myself putting burdens on my team. My communication, teamwork, and managerial skills are poor and always will be. Yet I always seem to do things technically that makes people look at me like I discovered fire. For me to say I didn't outperform my colleagues would be effectively to say I had no value as an employee since there would be nothing to compensate for my shortcomings. There have been meetings about me where everybody except me was in the room and I was talked about and the only reasons the team decided not to fire me was my performance and work ethic. It makes me feel really bad reading all the response to high performers that aren't well rounded like they are inherently arrogant toxic drags on a team. There's nothing wrong with having an employee with a lopsided skillset in a team that can support somebody like that. I think seeing such employees as inherently toxic, or seeing them as a holy grail. They're like artillery; only effective with support.
- deogeo 7y ago
  > My communication, teamwork, and managerial skills are poor and always will be. Could you elaborate on how they're poor? And why you think it won't/can't change? You seem to have expressed yourself very clearly in this post, so at least when it comes to communication, I can't deduce any shortcomings (from this post).
  - TheOperator 7y ago
    Autism. So text based communication isn't impaired. Also led me to spend a lot of time on the computer so I naturally got better at using them. I send a lot of emails at work and my co-workers will usually try and deal with walkups. Writing is a strong point for me. There's little problems with communication like having the emotional intelligence to tell when your co-workers are having a hard time and when to back off and treat them differently. I lack that which puts extra stress on them. I tend to say too much and make my team lose face and cause us political problems. So I try to compensate by doing such a good job my co-workers won't be under as much pressure to work hard and my team will be doing such a good job we won't get in shit.
closeparen 7y ago
All I can say is, it’s been my subjective experience that competence and productivity are really variable. Some people at my company can produce beautiful, working, end to end solutions for complex problems in the time it takes others to grind out trivial maintenance tickets. Everyone knows who they are. Programmers are not basically all the same, and it’s worth thinking about the nature of the differences if you want to become one of those people, hire them, retain them, grow your team to be more like them, etc. To write them all off as myths, children, assholes, etc. is to reject the possibility of substantially improving at our craft. That’s a dangerous thing to do.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Agreed. I've known some very productive, very stable, very nice engineers. I've met the erratic kind too, but they're definitely not all that way.
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  Agreed. I was formulating it as this (at a previous job, obviously) There are 4 "top engineers." All 4 of these top engineers would identify each other as such. There are 4 "D tier engineers." You'd rather have any ONE of the "top engineers" than ALL the "D tier" engineers. These D-Tier engineers usually end up "managing" a rote manual process (e.g. calling a script sending emails in batches manually), when any "top tier" engineer would have written an automatic scripted solution that runs periodically, batches on an intelligent interval, logs its output, and automatically alarms if its results are anomalous (and done so in a week and moved on to a new project).
- espeed 7y ago
  10x programmers can hit a target no one else can see. This is true for 10x persons of all types in all endeavours, not just programmers. In this mode they are more artists than technicians. Compelled by vision from an overflowing sacred gift outpacing its faithful servant. Conventions and norms are not designed for this. Those who push beyond the bounds by definition cannot be bound by them. If you want to maximize their productivity, provide them with supporting infrastructure and surround them with brilliant editors to optimize this process and integrate their vision.
lawn 7y ago
One interesting twist is that some problems are completely intractable for most programmers. I mean that they cannot produce a working solution no matter how much time or effort they use, or if they do it's so riddled with bugs it's practically useless. Thus it follows that for certain tasks there are "∞x" programmers. Therefore there are absolutely "10x" programmers as well, which fits in with my subjective experience. Certainly domain knowledge can play a very big role, but there are also rare individuals that seem to be much more productive no matter the task.
- ntoshev 7y ago
  It's certainly task-dependent at least to some extent. If the task at hand is to fix a zillion spelling errors in the UI, there is certainly no 10x variance in programmer's ability (there might be a big variance in motivation though, and individual performance is a product of motivation and ability).
- CountSessine 7y ago
  I mean that they cannot produce a working solution no matter how much time or effort they use Of course, but they don't represent the middle of the distribution. When people speak of the myth of the "10x programmer", that claim is meaningless if they can hold the reference productivity all the way to the far left of the distribution. Any meaningful claim of "10x programmers" needs to be measured against the mean or median of the distribution - the so-called "average programmer". How many non-dysfunctional "10x programmers" who don't create messes for others genuinely exist?
  - opportune 7y ago
    >but they don't represent the middle of the distribution Really? I don't think most middle-of-the-road engineers, given certain requirements, could come up with a working solution in any reasonable amount of time. For example if you just told an engineer "Implement a basic server that can execute queries based on this language spec, where you upload tables as immutable tab-separated text files" I'd guess only the top 5% of engineers could get something working in less than a month. I don't think that executing tasks like this is something that innately only some small x% of engineers can do. For example, almost all engineers will lack at least some of the skills needed to complete any sufficiently large task: best practices for translating a query to a query plan, how to do efficient Ser-De, what data structures to use to implement the data, etc. But most engineers lack the meta-skills or traits needed to complete the task. For example, would they first look at how basic SQL implementations and toy projects work? Look up some of the theory of RDBMS? Would they know how to write good tests, good class structures that don't require refactoring in 2 weeks as they understand more portions of the problem. Would they try to roll their own query parser or use a standardized tool like antlr?
fastbeef 7y ago
10x discussion aside, I found this quote to be eye opening, and not just about programmers: “The 10x programmer is essentially a libertarian concept: That is, they do it all by themselves because they don’t recognize how much is done for them by others.”
intellix 7y ago
Definitely, but only because some developers are insanely incompetent. Sometimes they'll spend days going around in circles, creating files and writing hundreds of lines and introducing a couple of dependencies. When it comes to review time it's like... Wtf are you doing? It's a 5 second one word fix? It's not 10x code, it's 10x faster to deliver value and solve problems
foobar_ 7y ago
After working with ~ 30 odd programmers, I would probably classify myself as a 10x. I think a good chunk of HN'ers are 10x, with imposter syndrome of course. 1. Patience - I have the patience to sit through and fix a bug. Googling it, reading the source ... this is fun for me. 1x programmers give up very often and very soon. They either blame others, feel pity for themselves for not figuring it out or hate the computer for giving the wrong answer. 2. Fuck OOP - I stick to the separation between data and code. If I am forced to use OOP, I abuse the command pattern. My code is procedural for the most part. Procedural code is easier to debug .. usually, when I see a bug, I know the exact function. 1x go "wow" at this, whereas I feel like an Imposter. 3. Tools - This would probably be my biggest sin and probably where I could be a bit of a hipster. I stick to tools and libraries that make me productive. 4. News - I try to keep up with the latest news. This often helps me leverage the next best thing for increased productivity. 5. Egoless - I don't care about rewriting, throwing away and deleting code ... trying a new library. 1x programmers get attached to their babies. 6. My code is not a mess, your ideology is a mess - I've found it easier to work with absolute beginners, 0x, than "experienced" programmers who like to throw jargon around. Beginners tend to find my code easy to follow, easy to fix, easy to debug. The first instinct of the "experienced" is to rewrite it because it's not "clean" enough for them. I'd rather you look at the forest than the tree. The whole thing delivers 80% of what business users want! I've had three projects where I did in two weeks what a group 10 programmers took months and that's sad. Things where I can imporve 1. Testing - I usually do a lot of integration testing for the critical paths. 2. Security - I always tell people to hire pen-testers but no one ever listens! 3. Documentation - My biggest weak point of all. In my defense, I choose functions names reasonably stupidly. I think it's good move to hire great documentation writers. 4. Complex Algorithms and Maths - Always good to know more! This is where I have to rely on 100x programmers to come up with a good library. I aspire to be 100x.
- nickkell 7y ago
  I'm definitely a 10x programmer, but unfortunately 90% of my time is spent on hackernews, so nothing is gained.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
cafard 7y ago
Did Gerald Weinberg speak of 10x programmers? I don't think I have a copy of The Psychology of Computer Programming, but that doesn't really sound like his later work.
Traster 7y ago
I feel like we probably spend too much time playing around with the idea of 10x engineers. It's definitely true there are more effective engineers and less effective engineers, but I really find it funny that there's always a focus on the 10x engineer. Partly because it's impossible ot judge a 10x engineer truly, and partly because it almost always is accompanied by a story about how the 10x engineer only works on one specific type of problem, almost never in a way that adds value to a customer. What you really often have is a 0.95x engineering team - where one engineer has the 10x reputation and the team as a whole is performing 0.95x. Meanwhile the 3x team contains a number of '10x' engineers operating at 4x and making sure everyone else is the team is around the same level as them. What I hope we can all agree on is that in every day life we're a long way past the point where a single engineer is going to make or break your company by being 10x. It's far more important to be making sure that a team of 10 is working at 3x or a team of 100 is working at 1.2x.
- segmondy 7y ago
  I think the focus is just pure jealousy just the same way people are jealous of those who are 10x income earners. There are 10x engineers out there who not only product great work, but solid work that doesn't need support, they test, they document. They might not be a pleasure to work with for most because their thinking level is completely different and they don't subscribe to modern software rituals. They focus on what it takes to get it done. I can't agree that we are way past the point where a single engineer can't make or break the company being a 10x. Sure for most enterprises, but startups and small companies those are still valuable if they can get one.
thecleaner 7y ago
I think the people looking hard for 10x engineers are poor team builders. The thing is a team of two good engineers can be a much more potent combination than one 10x arrogant prick who cant communicate or work in a team. Good engineers are still rare but they more frequently found than 10x engineers.
netsectoday 7y ago
Here are some indicators I've seen from 10x and 100x: The 10x person fits very well in their organization. They are admired by upper-management for their ability to quickly comprehend, estimate, and deliver solutions to problems. They mentor everyone that asks or needs help. They provide 95% test coverage on all code. They show up for work well dressed, clean-cut, and on-time every day. Their code isn't 'brilliant' because they understand it must be maintained by the whole team. Their code reads well across difference experience levels but also includes clever tricks. They have an absolutely rock-solid understanding of the operating environment, platform, and modules. They don't document their code. They are the smartest person you know. The 100x person seems to fit very well into the organization at first, and appears to be a 10x. They take on several seemingly-impossible tasks up front and eat it for breakfast. They automate large portions of the business and their own processes. They provide 99% test coverage on all code. They create production-quality docs after their public interface solidifies. They know security and implement it correctly. They spend months to years on self-driven projects to master different categories and build their tech-tree. They have invented tech and patented it. They bump into the intentional barriers of the organization. They break through and create a billion-dollar product, or they are removed from the organization. They are the smartest person you know and without explanation they appear to be insane. It really seems 10x is a stigmatized term. It used to mean a developer that could produce 10x lines of code, but at this point I've taken it to mean a single developer that can leverage technology, their department, and organization to manifest a 10x positive impact compared to someone just cashing their check delivering story points. I don't think this term really fits for someone on the spectrum wreaking havoc in their organization.
- jmchuster 7y ago
  in my experience, 80% coverage is about the correct number, but then those same lines of code are being covered over and over again for each major business use case.
  - netsectoday 7y ago
    Bumping the test coverage up past 90% definitely has lines re-run multiple times, with core logic even being re-executed possibly hundreds of times. This is absolutely ok! Your main purpose of writing tests is to make sure when you change business logic that a test will point you to the exact spot. If you commented out any single line of business logic; a test should fail. I understand that this may seem crazy if you are used to 80% coverage, however there are subtle ways to build your unit/integration/feature/security/performance tests where you only pin your public api, and code changes to the internals don't break the tests, and the test suites only have minimal (necessary) overlap. This is test engineering and it takes about a decade of TDD to be comfortable with. I would have said 100% test coverage for 100x but that last 1% isn't worth it. Some things just can't be tested without altering the public interface of your code JUST to accommodate the test, or they require some crazy significant re-work of the code that makes it hard to follow, or you have a module with a crazy way of interfacing with it that makes testing a specific part extremely difficult, or it's code that doesn't really need a test (like a log statement). Side note: 99% test coverage isn't typical but is absolutely necessary if you have automatic patch-management solutions in place and are striving towards zero-defect code. How comfortable would you be pushing to production after bumping the major version of your platform and seeing your test suite pass? Having 99% confidence in this situation is a good thing and saves you time in the long run.
futureastronaut 7y ago
Being a 10x programmer or whatever isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's not like they let you work 1/10x, or even 1/2x. You're expected to deliver that 10x 50 weeks a year, it's impossible to not get burned out. The "velocity tracking" craze is killer. A very strong developer and regular in #python on IRC was working as a janitor for a while. I didn't get it then, now I totally get it. It's hard to muster the motivation to continue working in software.
drdeadringer 7y ago
I remember once being asked during a phone-screen how many lines of code I had written. Ever. Some of those things were on classified systems years ago, there is no way I'm going to remember that or even be able to look that up any more. Why would I ever log "wrote a net-worth of xyz lines of code today" for a personal record? I've never worked for anybody who had that as a metric but apparently I had a chance to now; I gave them an estimate and moved on. The kicker was that the question had absolutely nothing to do with the job. Nothing.
- esmi 7y ago
  It was probably just a question testing your ability to estimate. Of the “how many manholes are in Seattle” ilk.
  - cruano 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhKMuDJ_E8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhKMuDJ_E8
- blodovnik 7y ago
  It's a question to ask to weed out people who say "I'm a programmer" but a tually haven't written much code.
froh42 7y ago
As an experienced programmer - if you really want to improve productivity 10 times, find the junior programmers in your team, empower them, give your advice when asked, shut up when not being asked, tell them they can do that hard task and help them out when they have problems. Be a decent human being. Then watch with pride as they grow in amazingly quick time. Oh - and just work for a company, that honors when you're doing that. Nowadays programming is teamwork.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  I'd argue that programming, like any other human endeavor, has always been teamwork.
  - EForEndeavour 7y ago
    In a sense, every programmer is a member of a global, mostly remote, asynchronous team of every person who contributed to the hardware, software, documentation, and theoretical foundations upon which the programmer depends.

114 points by jamessun 7y ago

There will always be outliers but it really depends what thing the 10x programmer is making ten times more of. If it's simply lines of code then it can strongly be argued that he's creating 10x more technical debt as well, as one of the stories suggests. I've read that many outlier programmers are on the moderate-to-advanced portion of the autistic scale, at a place where it's actually a superpower in terms of being able to concentrate and write massive amounts of code and usually very good quality. The biggest problem with devs like that is that their colleages/teammates have a hard time keeping up with them and management usually tries to coerce others to try to catch up and not treat them like the benevolent freak they are. Even if there's no conflict with a high quality 10x performer there's also the future case problem of trying to figure out how to fill the shoes of such a dev if/when they leave. Management will never authorize hiring 10 people to replace that person, and unless the person was writing perfect code your maintenance is usually a lot more than your staff can handle as well. Are there other fields/jobs where someone can consistently produce 10x more than others simply on their own ability?

codingslave 7y ago
I agree with this, for anyone to be a 10x developer, most likely their brain has massive deficiencies in other areas of functioning. I've only worked with one 10x developer in my life. After seeing his code and problem solving abilities, I started to question whether I was any good at coding at all (and I am regularly regarded as the best on my team). Finance is another industry that supports 10x employees, its common for traders with a natural ability at pattern recognition to produce 10x - 100x returns. Like technology, their minds can be leveraged by increasing the amount of capital they can manage.
yarg 7y ago
The spectrum guys are good for deep dives and best operating practice based implementation, not so much on branching code and creativity.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
> Are there other fields/jobs where someone can consistently produce 10x more than others simply on their own ability? Sales. Some people can make it rain and generally nobody begrudges paying them well to do so.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Fiction or non-fiction writing. The difference between Terry Brooks and the average wannabe fantasy author is enormous and the difference between him and JRR Tolkien is greater again. Mathematics. Terence Tao is as far ahead of the average Math professor as they are of the average high school Math teacher. Law. If you give the average lawyer twenty times as much time and all the research resources of a partner at Skadden Arps the Skadden guy will still come out on top. Finance. Whether you’re talking VC, PE or Hedge Funds the people at the top are a lot more than ten times as good as the average, never mind the marginal member of their reference class. All of academia as far as research is concerned. Research impact as measured by citations is a power law. People at top departments routinely get hundreds of times the citations of those at no name ones. In any human endeavour that isn’t limited by severe bottlenecks in material input you get people who can do much more with much less than others can, and who are capable of doing things that those less skilled simply can’t do.
  - rightbyte 7y ago
    Add carpentry or vehicle technician to that list. All jobs where you have some sort of choice on how and what to do and motoric aptitude leads to high variance in skills. The big difference is maybe that bad vehicle technicians are singled out by the boss or customers and quit? While neither the boss or customer can pinpoint a single programmer.
    - tuesdayrain 7y ago
      I think this boils down to literally any arbitrary skill based activity. Unless the output is heavily dependent on RNG, there will always be someone who is orders of magnitude better than the average person.
yarg 7y ago
One other thing, software has the benefit that product development occurs in a simulation. There's a freedom that comes with that, we're unbound by physics - layer upon layer of abstraction make it a lost concern. It feeds into itself, growing in power at a rate proportional to its surface. Until that is, it collapses under its own weight. When that happens is a matter of structure, and the extent to which the developer understands what the structure is, where it should be and how it must expand to cater for new requirements. For simple cases a single largely linear block of code will be fine. Eventually things get more complex. You'll need to move the lower level functionality to another file and call through to its methods. Some of the methods in these files will become so heavily parameterised - and with repeat parameters - that you might want to introduce state. Welcome to OOP. Then with the proliferation of the files you've created you'll need to introduce a directory structure. Then a module structure. Then a separation of API and implementations. Then a division across projects. At any of these points some will falter. Some can't even write a single class without copying a pasting massive blocks of code. Some write class after class without consideration of abstraction or structure. Yes there are 10x developers - those who understand structure and can implement the code accordingly. Why does this happen in software and not other industries? As I said, we're unbound by reality. If the best of us were engineers, we would be more tightly constrained by the physical limitations of the world. If the worst of us were engineers, they would get people killed.
- ed312 7y ago
  You've described how I feel about this in such a succinct yet expressive way. I find it hard to communicate to ${NON_PROGRAMMERS} the difference between highly skilled software folks, average skilled, and the huge bulk of copy+paste wannabe's.

TheOperator 7y ago

>The 10x programmer is essentially a libertarian concept: That is, they do it all by themselves because they don’t recognize how much is done for them by others. I'm finding myself meeting a lot of "10x" descriptors. I'm not doing 10x the work but I'm definitely doing the work of the next two highest performing colleagues put together. I also see myself putting burdens on my team. My communication, teamwork, and managerial skills are poor and always will be. Yet I always seem to do things technically that makes people look at me like I discovered fire. For me to say I didn't outperform my colleagues would be effectively to say I had no value as an employee since there would be nothing to compensate for my shortcomings. There have been meetings about me where everybody except me was in the room and I was talked about and the only reasons the team decided not to fire me was my performance and work ethic. It makes me feel really bad reading all the response to high performers that aren't well rounded like they are inherently arrogant toxic drags on a team. There's nothing wrong with having an employee with a lopsided skillset in a team that can support somebody like that. I think seeing such employees as inherently toxic, or seeing them as a holy grail. They're like artillery; only effective with support.

deogeo 7y ago
> My communication, teamwork, and managerial skills are poor and always will be. Could you elaborate on how they're poor? And why you think it won't/can't change? You seem to have expressed yourself very clearly in this post, so at least when it comes to communication, I can't deduce any shortcomings (from this post).
- TheOperator 7y ago
  Autism. So text based communication isn't impaired. Also led me to spend a lot of time on the computer so I naturally got better at using them. I send a lot of emails at work and my co-workers will usually try and deal with walkups. Writing is a strong point for me. There's little problems with communication like having the emotional intelligence to tell when your co-workers are having a hard time and when to back off and treat them differently. I lack that which puts extra stress on them. I tend to say too much and make my team lose face and cause us political problems. So I try to compensate by doing such a good job my co-workers won't be under as much pressure to work hard and my team will be doing such a good job we won't get in shit.

closeparen 7y ago

All I can say is, it’s been my subjective experience that competence and productivity are really variable. Some people at my company can produce beautiful, working, end to end solutions for complex problems in the time it takes others to grind out trivial maintenance tickets. Everyone knows who they are. Programmers are not basically all the same, and it’s worth thinking about the nature of the differences if you want to become one of those people, hire them, retain them, grow your team to be more like them, etc. To write them all off as myths, children, assholes, etc. is to reject the possibility of substantially improving at our craft. That’s a dangerous thing to do.

james_s_tayler 7y ago
Agreed. I've known some very productive, very stable, very nice engineers. I've met the erratic kind too, but they're definitely not all that way.
alexandercrohde 7y ago
Agreed. I was formulating it as this (at a previous job, obviously) There are 4 "top engineers." All 4 of these top engineers would identify each other as such. There are 4 "D tier engineers." You'd rather have any ONE of the "top engineers" than ALL the "D tier" engineers. These D-Tier engineers usually end up "managing" a rote manual process (e.g. calling a script sending emails in batches manually), when any "top tier" engineer would have written an automatic scripted solution that runs periodically, batches on an intelligent interval, logs its output, and automatically alarms if its results are anomalous (and done so in a week and moved on to a new project).
espeed 7y ago
10x programmers can hit a target no one else can see. This is true for 10x persons of all types in all endeavours, not just programmers. In this mode they are more artists than technicians. Compelled by vision from an overflowing sacred gift outpacing its faithful servant. Conventions and norms are not designed for this. Those who push beyond the bounds by definition cannot be bound by them. If you want to maximize their productivity, provide them with supporting infrastructure and surround them with brilliant editors to optimize this process and integrate their vision.

lawn 7y ago

One interesting twist is that some problems are completely intractable for most programmers. I mean that they cannot produce a working solution no matter how much time or effort they use, or if they do it's so riddled with bugs it's practically useless. Thus it follows that for certain tasks there are "∞x" programmers. Therefore there are absolutely "10x" programmers as well, which fits in with my subjective experience. Certainly domain knowledge can play a very big role, but there are also rare individuals that seem to be much more productive no matter the task.

ntoshev 7y ago
It's certainly task-dependent at least to some extent. If the task at hand is to fix a zillion spelling errors in the UI, there is certainly no 10x variance in programmer's ability (there might be a big variance in motivation though, and individual performance is a product of motivation and ability).
CountSessine 7y ago
I mean that they cannot produce a working solution no matter how much time or effort they use Of course, but they don't represent the middle of the distribution. When people speak of the myth of the "10x programmer", that claim is meaningless if they can hold the reference productivity all the way to the far left of the distribution. Any meaningful claim of "10x programmers" needs to be measured against the mean or median of the distribution - the so-called "average programmer". How many non-dysfunctional "10x programmers" who don't create messes for others genuinely exist?
- opportune 7y ago
  >but they don't represent the middle of the distribution Really? I don't think most middle-of-the-road engineers, given certain requirements, could come up with a working solution in any reasonable amount of time. For example if you just told an engineer "Implement a basic server that can execute queries based on this language spec, where you upload tables as immutable tab-separated text files" I'd guess only the top 5% of engineers could get something working in less than a month. I don't think that executing tasks like this is something that innately only some small x% of engineers can do. For example, almost all engineers will lack at least some of the skills needed to complete any sufficiently large task: best practices for translating a query to a query plan, how to do efficient Ser-De, what data structures to use to implement the data, etc. But most engineers lack the meta-skills or traits needed to complete the task. For example, would they first look at how basic SQL implementations and toy projects work? Look up some of the theory of RDBMS? Would they know how to write good tests, good class structures that don't require refactoring in 2 weeks as they understand more portions of the problem. Would they try to roll their own query parser or use a standardized tool like antlr?

fastbeef 7y ago

10x discussion aside, I found this quote to be eye opening, and not just about programmers: “The 10x programmer is essentially a libertarian concept: That is, they do it all by themselves because they don’t recognize how much is done for them by others.”

intellix 7y ago

Definitely, but only because some developers are insanely incompetent. Sometimes they'll spend days going around in circles, creating files and writing hundreds of lines and introducing a couple of dependencies. When it comes to review time it's like... Wtf are you doing? It's a 5 second one word fix? It's not 10x code, it's 10x faster to deliver value and solve problems

foobar_ 7y ago

After working with ~ 30 odd programmers, I would probably classify myself as a 10x. I think a good chunk of HN'ers are 10x, with imposter syndrome of course. 1. Patience - I have the patience to sit through and fix a bug. Googling it, reading the source ... this is fun for me. 1x programmers give up very often and very soon. They either blame others, feel pity for themselves for not figuring it out or hate the computer for giving the wrong answer. 2. Fuck OOP - I stick to the separation between data and code. If I am forced to use OOP, I abuse the command pattern. My code is procedural for the most part. Procedural code is easier to debug .. usually, when I see a bug, I know the exact function. 1x go "wow" at this, whereas I feel like an Imposter. 3. Tools - This would probably be my biggest sin and probably where I could be a bit of a hipster. I stick to tools and libraries that make me productive. 4. News - I try to keep up with the latest news. This often helps me leverage the next best thing for increased productivity. 5. Egoless - I don't care about rewriting, throwing away and deleting code ... trying a new library. 1x programmers get attached to their babies. 6. My code is not a mess, your ideology is a mess - I've found it easier to work with absolute beginners, 0x, than "experienced" programmers who like to throw jargon around. Beginners tend to find my code easy to follow, easy to fix, easy to debug. The first instinct of the "experienced" is to rewrite it because it's not "clean" enough for them. I'd rather you look at the forest than the tree. The whole thing delivers 80% of what business users want! I've had three projects where I did in two weeks what a group 10 programmers took months and that's sad. Things where I can imporve 1. Testing - I usually do a lot of integration testing for the critical paths. 2. Security - I always tell people to hire pen-testers but no one ever listens! 3. Documentation - My biggest weak point of all. In my defense, I choose functions names reasonably stupidly. I think it's good move to hire great documentation writers. 4. Complex Algorithms and Maths - Always good to know more! This is where I have to rely on 100x programmers to come up with a good library. I aspire to be 100x.

nickkell 7y ago
I'm definitely a 10x programmer, but unfortunately 90% of my time is spent on hackernews, so nothing is gained.
- faissaloo 7y ago

cafard 7y ago

Did Gerald Weinberg speak of 10x programmers? I don't think I have a copy of The Psychology of Computer Programming, but that doesn't really sound like his later work.

Traster 7y ago

I feel like we probably spend too much time playing around with the idea of 10x engineers. It's definitely true there are more effective engineers and less effective engineers, but I really find it funny that there's always a focus on the 10x engineer. Partly because it's impossible ot judge a 10x engineer truly, and partly because it almost always is accompanied by a story about how the 10x engineer only works on one specific type of problem, almost never in a way that adds value to a customer. What you really often have is a 0.95x engineering team - where one engineer has the 10x reputation and the team as a whole is performing 0.95x. Meanwhile the 3x team contains a number of '10x' engineers operating at 4x and making sure everyone else is the team is around the same level as them. What I hope we can all agree on is that in every day life we're a long way past the point where a single engineer is going to make or break your company by being 10x. It's far more important to be making sure that a team of 10 is working at 3x or a team of 100 is working at 1.2x.

segmondy 7y ago
I think the focus is just pure jealousy just the same way people are jealous of those who are 10x income earners. There are 10x engineers out there who not only product great work, but solid work that doesn't need support, they test, they document. They might not be a pleasure to work with for most because their thinking level is completely different and they don't subscribe to modern software rituals. They focus on what it takes to get it done. I can't agree that we are way past the point where a single engineer can't make or break the company being a 10x. Sure for most enterprises, but startups and small companies those are still valuable if they can get one.

thecleaner 7y ago

I think the people looking hard for 10x engineers are poor team builders. The thing is a team of two good engineers can be a much more potent combination than one 10x arrogant prick who cant communicate or work in a team. Good engineers are still rare but they more frequently found than 10x engineers.

netsectoday 7y ago

Here are some indicators I've seen from 10x and 100x: The 10x person fits very well in their organization. They are admired by upper-management for their ability to quickly comprehend, estimate, and deliver solutions to problems. They mentor everyone that asks or needs help. They provide 95% test coverage on all code. They show up for work well dressed, clean-cut, and on-time every day. Their code isn't 'brilliant' because they understand it must be maintained by the whole team. Their code reads well across difference experience levels but also includes clever tricks. They have an absolutely rock-solid understanding of the operating environment, platform, and modules. They don't document their code. They are the smartest person you know. The 100x person seems to fit very well into the organization at first, and appears to be a 10x. They take on several seemingly-impossible tasks up front and eat it for breakfast. They automate large portions of the business and their own processes. They provide 99% test coverage on all code. They create production-quality docs after their public interface solidifies. They know security and implement it correctly. They spend months to years on self-driven projects to master different categories and build their tech-tree. They have invented tech and patented it. They bump into the intentional barriers of the organization. They break through and create a billion-dollar product, or they are removed from the organization. They are the smartest person you know and without explanation they appear to be insane. It really seems 10x is a stigmatized term. It used to mean a developer that could produce 10x lines of code, but at this point I've taken it to mean a single developer that can leverage technology, their department, and organization to manifest a 10x positive impact compared to someone just cashing their check delivering story points. I don't think this term really fits for someone on the spectrum wreaking havoc in their organization.

jmchuster 7y ago
in my experience, 80% coverage is about the correct number, but then those same lines of code are being covered over and over again for each major business use case.
- netsectoday 7y ago
  Bumping the test coverage up past 90% definitely has lines re-run multiple times, with core logic even being re-executed possibly hundreds of times. This is absolutely ok! Your main purpose of writing tests is to make sure when you change business logic that a test will point you to the exact spot. If you commented out any single line of business logic; a test should fail. I understand that this may seem crazy if you are used to 80% coverage, however there are subtle ways to build your unit/integration/feature/security/performance tests where you only pin your public api, and code changes to the internals don't break the tests, and the test suites only have minimal (necessary) overlap. This is test engineering and it takes about a decade of TDD to be comfortable with. I would have said 100% test coverage for 100x but that last 1% isn't worth it. Some things just can't be tested without altering the public interface of your code JUST to accommodate the test, or they require some crazy significant re-work of the code that makes it hard to follow, or you have a module with a crazy way of interfacing with it that makes testing a specific part extremely difficult, or it's code that doesn't really need a test (like a log statement). Side note: 99% test coverage isn't typical but is absolutely necessary if you have automatic patch-management solutions in place and are striving towards zero-defect code. How comfortable would you be pushing to production after bumping the major version of your platform and seeing your test suite pass? Having 99% confidence in this situation is a good thing and saves you time in the long run.

futureastronaut 7y ago

Being a 10x programmer or whatever isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's not like they let you work 1/10x, or even 1/2x. You're expected to deliver that 10x 50 weeks a year, it's impossible to not get burned out. The "velocity tracking" craze is killer. A very strong developer and regular in #python on IRC was working as a janitor for a while. I didn't get it then, now I totally get it. It's hard to muster the motivation to continue working in software.

drdeadringer 7y ago

I remember once being asked during a phone-screen how many lines of code I had written. Ever. Some of those things were on classified systems years ago, there is no way I'm going to remember that or even be able to look that up any more. Why would I ever log "wrote a net-worth of xyz lines of code today" for a personal record? I've never worked for anybody who had that as a metric but apparently I had a chance to now; I gave them an estimate and moved on. The kicker was that the question had absolutely nothing to do with the job. Nothing.

esmi 7y ago
It was probably just a question testing your ability to estimate. Of the “how many manholes are in Seattle” ilk.
- cruano 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhKMuDJ_E8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxhKMuDJ_E8
blodovnik 7y ago
It's a question to ask to weed out people who say "I'm a programmer" but a tually haven't written much code.

froh42 7y ago

As an experienced programmer - if you really want to improve productivity 10 times, find the junior programmers in your team, empower them, give your advice when asked, shut up when not being asked, tell them they can do that hard task and help them out when they have problems. Be a decent human being. Then watch with pride as they grow in amazingly quick time. Oh - and just work for a company, that honors when you're doing that. Nowadays programming is teamwork.

bovermyer 7y ago
I'd argue that programming, like any other human endeavor, has always been teamwork.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  In a sense, every programmer is a member of a global, mostly remote, asynchronous team of every person who contributed to the hardware, software, documentation, and theoretical foundations upon which the programmer depends.