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The Myth of the Myth of the 10x Programmer

248 points by payne92 7y ago

wanone 7y ago
10x programmer @ 1x pay
slowhand09 7y ago
They are rare, but definitely out there. I've worked with one, managed one, never been one. One charateristic I observed over these 2, they'd take a manual home and read it over a day or two. They'd retain most of it. They tend to be touch typist not needing to look at the keyboard often. This reduces context switching and lets them flow when they are being creative. They know and remember syntax, library routines and interfaces so they aren't stopping to look things up. They "try on the fly", fail fast and often, and move to alternatives when blocked. The ones I know I'd love to start a company with. But I would be the bottleneck...
tanseydavid 7y ago
10X programmers do exist but good luck finding them as Job Seekers. It is also a concept which is NOT SCALABLE.
Eridrus 7y ago
One thing I have observed recently is the existence of "10X projects". This might be a symptom of working at a big company, but I have been really impressed by the ability of some projects to achieve their ends while others get stuck in quagmires due to the fault of nobody on the project per se, but rather the definition of the project itself.
remmargorp64 7y ago
10X programmers DO exist. They aren't just a myth, and they aren't just about knowing when to buy vs build, or when to use a particular framework or toolkit, or how to "mentor" other developers. Chris Sawyer wrote 99% of the code for RollerCoaster Tycoon in x86 assembly language, with the remaining one percent written in C. RollerCoaster Tycoon was a beautiful game which still stands the test of time to this day. The fact that a single person was able to build a blockbuster-level game almost entirely by themselves in assembly is a truly impressive feat which very few programmers would even dream of undertaking. Being a "real" 10X programmer is like being a savant. It's about being FUCKING SMART, and it's about being able to deliver a working, polished product in the same time that a normal team of ten people would be able to deliver it (or in a tenth of the time that a single person might).
- collyw 7y ago
  Surely it depends a lot on the project. When I wrote the system myself then I was a 10x developer. Now I am working on someone else's code i am not.
  - username90 7y ago
    > When I wrote the system myself then I was a 10x developer. Where you 10x more productive than other developers writing systems themselves?
    - collyw 7y ago
      No that's the point. I currently work on a system that is written by someone else. He fixes bugs a lot quicker than me, as he has a lot clearer mental model. I need to reverse engineer ideas from code a lot of the time.
- zweep 7y ago
  And there’s a 1000x programmer who doesn’t deliver something that a team of 1000 people would create, they deliver something that a 1000 person team couldn’t create in their wildest dreams. Dennis Ritchie, Jeff Dean, etc.
- kwhat4 7y ago
  You are right, they do exist... but they are probably not producing what you expect. I have had the privileged of coming into companies that had a programmer who wrote 10x more code than everyone else at the organization. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this code was not maintainable, riddled with bugs and had several critical security vulnerabilities in it. Good programmers are not programmers that create 1000s of lines of code an hour with no thought to maintainability. If that were the case, we would have 500 million programmers in India cranking out the worlds best code. Any time I hear an organization talk about a 10x/Rockstar/1% developer, I run the other way as fast as possible.
- bluetwo 7y ago
  I agree they exist. The article does too, at the end: ...highly productive developers (10x or otherwise) are problem-solving at a much higher level. Their productivity won’t be apparent from a narrow test, any more than the overall skill of a world-class football player would be apparent from (say) how fast they could run the 100m dash. The most productive developers are solving big problems, and are bringing judgment and experience to bear on essential design, architecture, and “build vs use existing library” decisions. They’re designing key abstractions that will pay dividends through the life of the project...
deleted 7y ago
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amznthrowaway5 7y ago
> highly productive developers (10x or otherwise) are problem-solving at a much higher level This is a very important point, but calling these highly productive developers "10x" doesn't really make sense. They are more like "infinity times" compared to the average when it comes to getting a difficult task done, since the average developer would just get stuck and never be able to invent good designs and solve the difficult problems. Even worse, some programmers are in the negative on many tasks, adding additional complexity and overhead while making little to no positive contributions, especially when you give them a problem beyond their capabilities.
- wpasc 7y ago
  Joel Spolsky's "Hitting the high notes" always comes to mind for me when this debate arises.
  - teddyh 7y ago
    Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Spolsky is a 10x blogger. Neither he nor any of his employees were ever 10x programmers. There was nothing algorithmically clever about FogBugz or CityDesk or whatever.
    - lolc 7y ago
      Did you miss how they cross-compiled Vbscript to PHP? I'd say for a lot of programmers this would have been quite the challenge, algorithmically speaking. And I would classify it as clever. With both the positive and negative connotations of the word.
- SKILNER 7y ago
  Yes, it's this simple. The important point is that some things are just beyond the ability of average programmers, let alone, bad programmers. There are some things that only top programmers are able to actually finish before the end of the universe.
e1g 7y ago
I think we instinctively recognize the outsized levels of certain pros: a 10x leader that is a different creature from a typical manager, or a captivating writer that is 10x better than the average novelist, or a 10x actor vs a standard-issue LA newcomer, or a 10x teacher who inspires far beyond what curriculum mandates. Can we accept 10x lawyers, coaches, artists, or musicians based on their impact? We do, and we seek and celebrate them. Why fashion designers but not app designers, why essay writers but not program writers?
loopz 7y ago
What have the company done in the past 15 years to build a progressive learning culture?
gilbetron 7y ago
The concept of the 10x programmer seems to have been drifted from its original meaning. It isn't that there's a coder that is 10x better than a good coder. It is that a lot of people are really bad at their jobs, and a coder that thinks and learns about problems can be far better than those people. It comes from terrible "corporate drone" software developers in the 80s and 90s - the ones that would takes weeks to developer simple routines. Bring in someone that loves software dev, and they appear magical. Today, with Google and Stack Overflow, that gap has diminished, but there is definitely people still way better than "average" developers. However, if you have someone that keeps their skills sharp and their problem solving desire sharper, you won't fine anyone 10x - maybe 2 or 3x, at best.
- starpilot 7y ago
  Yeah, I can understand the "10x programmer" back when fizzbuzz was still being asked of CS graduates. Not anymore.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    To be honest, I didn't know that one... I just did basic double division the first time I saw it (into a float and compared it against an int casted back to a float). Someone in the interview room asked my if I remembered modulo and I was like 'oh yea, it gives you the remainder'
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      That operator's one I've used more on puzzles than in real life, where I've used it few enough times in 15ish years that I could count them on one hand. I think it only sticks in my mind because, for whatever reason, it was taught early and with some emphasis in a Perl book I read when I was starting out. If not for that I could well fail to come up with a reasonably "correct" solution to FizzBuzz.
    - khrbrt 7y ago
      That's honestly more impressive for creativity sake! FizzBuzz is just an example of the general problem of "given a set of things, do something to a subset of those things" which comes up often in real world settings. If you knew enough to set up a loop and apply some conditional inside of it, then you passed better than some of the programmers I've worked with.
liamcardenas 7y ago
Why wouldn’t there be such thing as a 10x programmer? Is the average programmer so good? There are outliers in every industry. Professional athletes are a clear example — they are often many orders of magnitude better than the average player of their respective sport. There are probably also a few 100x engineers, maybe someone like Elon.
- paublyrne 7y ago
  The equivalent comparison would be professional athletes at the top of their sport to other professional athletes in that sport working or playing in a lower league. Would the the top performers be 10x the other ones? Hard to quantify this, but I'd say no, more like 2x or at most 3x
  - thoman23 7y ago
    All you have to do is look at someone like LeBron. He single-handedly makes a team a championship contender.
WalterBright 7y ago
I personally know many programmers who are easily 10x average programmers. No question about it. They crank out code that is easy to read, easy to understand, works right out of the box, and gives years of trouble-free operation. Sean Parent is one of those programmers. It's pretty obvious when he describes how he replaced a nightmarish tangle of code that re-invented a simple rotate algorithm. It's a remarkable talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2tWOdzgXHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2tWOdzgXHA
paulus_magnus2 7y ago
Can we stop the self hate already? There definitely are 10x musicians, 10x painters, sportsmen and 10x programmers. You know what never exists in 10x form? Burocrats and middle managers who write articles like this one. I suggest to flag this as fake news and all future articles intended to devalue young talented programmers who yet are to discover their true market value.
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  Not trying to be a jerk, but I think you might need to re-read the article as the author is clearly a developer themselves and thinks that there are definitely 10x developers (just that they can't be found with a simple coding test).
  - Bnshsysjab 7y ago
    I would like to think I’m one of them, I’d flail about in attempt to solve some random programmer test, but I’m also the guy that sits back and says ‘hey how about we rethink this i n s a n e architecture?’
- teddyh 7y ago
  I think you missed the double negative in the title.
- kylec 7y ago
  I'll bet 10x managers do exist, but they quickly become VPs or CEOs
  - lordofgibbons 7y ago
    By that reasoning, for all practical purposes, they don't really exist. They were already rare to begin with but then they also move up the ranks quickly. One could argue VPs and CEOs technically have people reporting to them, but managing people isn't really their job. They are mostly concerned with strategy.
- emmelaich 7y ago
ccheever 7y ago
I think the way to think about this is that there are some people who figure out ways to do things or invent things that just wouldn't be figured out or discovered by other people. So, it's not 10x or anything-X even, it's just that, if the stuff that can be uniquely provided by "10x" people is important to you, then you need someone like that. 10 1x developers aren't likely to give you that (except to the extent that you have 10 chances to discover that one of them is actually a 10xer on some dimension).
t0astbread 7y ago
It doesn't matter whether 10x programmers exist. Programming is not a sport and as such, competition will only lead to narrow thinking, useless optimization and hatred. What we should really strive for is making programming a more creative activity where people learn from and inspire each other, not a competition. Oh and also, "finding the 10x engineer" feels like a hotspot to inject hidden bias into recruiting.
- closeparen 7y ago
  Communication overhead is expensive. All else being equal, it’s much better to build a small elite team that can operate successfully with less structure and process, rather than a large average one.
  - t0astbread 7y ago
    Right. But you can't build a functioning team that works together and can rely on each other by fostering a culture of competition and hiring only the "predestined" 10x engineers. If the team culture is to help each other, forgive mistakes and learn from each other without measuring who's the best the team will automatically build itself without the need to hire only "10x engineers". Or so I suppose. I'm not an HR person or anyone else with expertise in this field so you should take what I say with a grain of salt. I've just been thinking about this a lot as of late.
    - closeparen 7y ago
      Where I’ve seen teams with high concentrations of unusually smart people, they gelled and collaborated at least as well as anyone else. In fact the bandwidth and fidelity of their idea transfers is part of what made them impressive. It’s like they had their own little language to describe the codebase and what to do with it. These were mature and soft-spoken people; might be different with brash young hotshots.
      - t0astbread 7y ago
        To me that sounds like an environment where there's not a lot of competition involved. (Which is what I was describing.)
gandalfgeek 7y ago
If you look at the original paper (going back to 1968) where the data for a 10x difference was first found, there are a ton of... issues. I've covered this in detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gho89X72Xas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gho89X72Xas
chx 7y ago
I'd argue today a team could be 10x. Yes it requires someone who knows the concepts and can effectively communicate them but also awesome project managers, designers and QA personnel. A great team (I am lucky to be part of one) functions like a well oiled machine churning out acceptably quality features and fixes the problems at a surprising rate.
nybblesio 7y ago
The OP's example is perfect: he didn't go to the leaf-nodes and write each test by hand. Instead, it was clear that writing a tool to do the job would be better. Software is all about leverage. This is what defines a 10x programmer. However, I'm constantly amazed how many programmers fail to see the forest for the trees. To a large extent, not seeing (or seeing and ignoring) this type of solution is learned behavior. Many environments are hostile to this world view. Writing tools (especially those that generate code...eek!) is seen as "over-engineering" and "unnecessary complexity". If you're in a factory, on a line, your job isn't to climb away from your leaf-node. Any programmer has the potential to be 10x, they just have to see and act upon it. Few do.
- skybrian 7y ago
  It seems like you're almost debating yourself here, making arguments for opposite sides. If anyone could do it and environmental effects make all the difference, why emphasize individual initiative? But maybe the best thing to do would be to find a better environment, if you can?
CognitiveLens 7y ago
It's worth pointing out that the research found a 10x _spread_ between the least-productive and most-productive engineers - a '10xer' isn't someone who does ten times more than the average, so it becomes less mythical if you think about someone who does, e.g. 2x more than average in an organization with a few burned out engineers doing 20% of the average.
- odyssey7 7y ago
  Ah, so the secret to having a bunch of 5x engineers is to not burn them out.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 7y ago
I remember one programmer that I characterised with "He writes a lot of code". I ended up with one of his not small routines that I replaced with a one page assembler routine in MVS NIP rather than OPEN. When reworking printing software to support multi color, I researched a commonly used subroutine though several layers of calls and replaced it with, yes, a single character constant. I lost count of the many legacy applications where I tossed out great gobs of code produced by "productive" programmers.
- RealityVoid 7y ago
  I do not think 10x means "churns out code" but rather "produces results". And by this metric, by golly, there are a couple 10x out there for sure.
  - prostheticvamp 7y ago
    I think OP here was asserting that he was 10x in comparison to that guy, as being much more efficient.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  10x is also about quality. Not raw output. A lot of times the really fast devs are fast because they don't stop to consider how they can do things in a fundamentally much better way, they just churn out the status quo as fast as possible. Those type are not 10x.
jimbokun 7y ago
Here is your 10x programmer: https://norvig.com/sudoku.html https://norvig.com/sudoku.html "In this essay I tackle the problem of solving every Sudoku puzzle. It turns out to be quite easy (about one page of code for the main idea and two pages for embellishments) using two ideas: constraint propagation and search." If you gave this task to an "average" developer, how long would it take for them to implement? How many lines of code would it be? Would the implementation be correct? How long would their code take to execute? % python sudo.py All tests pass. Solved 50 of 50 easy puzzles (avg 0.01 secs (86 Hz), max 0.03 secs). Solved 95 of 95 hard puzzles (avg 0.04 secs (24 Hz), max 0.18 secs). Solved 11 of 11 hardest puzzles (avg 0.01 secs (71 Hz), max 0.02 secs). Solved 99 of 99 random puzzles (avg 0.01 secs (85 Hz), max 0.02 secs). Does the average developer know what "constraint propagation" and "search" mean in the above sense, or remember enough about them from their CS class to recognize them as the right tools and how to implement them? Also, can the average developer implement a spell checker from scratch on a single transcontinental flight? https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html So Norvig is always the paradigmatic example of the 10x developer, for me. Having a broad range of CS techniques at your disposal and knowing how and when to deploy them, is almost a super power.
- zzzeek 7y ago
  Norvig's work in those questions are more like the 100x developer category.
- mjw1007 7y ago
  I'm sure Norvig is very good, but I think the sudoku webpage is presenting a finished program in an idealised way, not recording the process he used to write it, false starts and all. (It seems likely to me that there were some false starts, because eliminate() returns either `values` or False, when both of its callers would be just as happy if it returned True or False.)
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - jimbokun 7y ago
petilon 7y ago
10x programmers do exist. But here's the thing: its not worth being a 10x programmer. Managers don't necessarily want them. First of all, if you complete a project 10x faster than the expected time, managers will assume that they had overestimated the project, as opposed to recognizing that you're a 10x programmer. I have seen this time after time after time. Secondly, if a manager does recognize that you're a 10x programmer then you will be seen as a risk: what happens if you leave the company? If the product was built by a team then that's a legit business. If the product was built by just 1 person then that's not a legit business as the business can suddenly collapse if that 1 person leaves. Third, you make your co-workers look bad by raising the expectations bar. You will not win any popularity contests. You may make your manager look bad too, if your performance diminishes the value of the manager. If you're indeed a highly capable programmer here's my advice: don't be a 10x programmer by doing 10x the quantity of work or completing projects in 1/10th the time. Instead be a 1.1x programmer, then expend your remaining energy helping your teammates grow, and broadening your influence. (So scale yourself horizontally instead of vertically.) This advice is often not easy to heed if you're introverted, and if you're extroverted you are already a manager instead of a programmer.
- EduardoBautista 7y ago
  I recommend going into consulting/contracting. A lot of money to be earned if you are really productive.
- chillacy 7y ago
  There are companies programmers are the ones doing the estimating, project managers hold them accountable, and managers dish out promotions and convey priorities.
- RHSeeger 7y ago
  > then expend your remaining energy helping your teammates grow, and broadening your influence All through reading this thread, my thought was that I'd rather be a force multiplier than a 10x programmer. I'd rather make an entire team write better, more maintainable code than just do more of the code myself. Past a certain point, the force multiplier adds more overall, plus their influence results in less _bad_ code, they raise the minimum bar.
1e-9 7y ago
Harder problem => Increased productivity variance For extremely hard problems, it's not difficult to measure greater than 10X differences between highly-talented senior developers and the average productivity of those capable of meeting requirements.
bloody-crow 7y ago
I think team sports is a good analogy here. There's no people who are 10x stronger, or who can run 10x faster than their teammates, but there's certainly people who'd score 10x points in certain circumstances than anybody else, and that is what 10x programmer is about.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Team sports is a terrible analogy. Like someone else mentioned, software is about leverage. There is no leverage in team sports.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
There are 10x salespeople, 10x authors, 10x basketball players, and 10x scientists; why should there not be 10x programmers?
thoman23 7y ago
A few people have touched on it here, but I'll add my voice. I firmly believe that there are programmers who are better described as a "1 vs. 0" programmer. Some programmers have a creative talent in them that leads them to create elegant solutions that literally a team of 50 average programmers would not.
deleted 7y ago
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DantesKite 7y ago
Despite the differences in definition, reading the comments on this page has been lovely. I’ve enjoyed the many perspectives.
overgard 7y ago
I agree with the article, but I also think it leaves out something fairly important, which is minimizing huge time sinks. Instead of being 10x better, how can you reduce wasted time 10x? I remember working with this one guy that was light years smarter than me, but if you watched him use the IDE it was painful. He did everything in the menus, slowly. How much of his life could he have back from memorizing f5 and a couple other shortcuts? Maybe you could reduce waste in various ways: * Learn keyboard shortcuts instead of pecking through menus * Use search instead of browsing (especially with keyboard shortcuts!) * Have you ever lost half a day debugging something that turned out to be dumb? (I have!) Is there a way to modify your coding style or your testing habits so you never hit that again? * Do you know your stack well enough that (given the time) you could reimplement the same ideas yourself? (Or is it a magic box that you can't debug? How much time and effort do you spend prodding the magic box?) * Have you automated all the manual things you currently do? * Are you wasting a lot of time dealing with bad abstractions when something much more basic would suffice? * Are you mastering your tools/languages/frameworks, or are you switching around so often that you spend a lot of time looking things up? * Do you have input into how your tasks are written, or are you stuck with whatever breakdown someone else came up with? Is your work getting awkwardly twisted to fit into these milestones? Can you work out a better system with your leads? That's the tip of the ice berg -- I think if you look at almost anything you do, you can generally find some aspect of it that's cumbersome and wasting your time. I feel like when you account for wasted effort/time, and removing it, becoming "10x" starts to seem a lot more reasonable -- it's not about being a genius, it's about being introspective and careful about how you perform your work. It saddens me to say this, but I think that sort of introspection is rare. I see so many programmers doing uncomfortable awkward things every day, because it's only like 10 extra seconds, except those 10 seconds times 20 times a day times a year and now that cost is out of control
- wvenable 7y ago
  If you think 10x programmers are merely more efficient and writing code, you're wrong. A 10x programmer produces 10x less code to solve the problem which is why they're 10x faster at it and the quality if higher. Some of this advice is good but actually being speedy is not necessary.
- 7y ago
sunstone 7y ago
To make an analogy with the ancient Roman trieme ships with three tiers of rowers. A 10x rower in that context is not the guy who can pull the oar 10 times harder, it's the guy who, while he can pull the oar, can also tell you when the ship is on course because he knows how to navigate and thereby makes everyone's effort more efficient.
cmhnn 7y ago
How does an industry so full of brilliant people who consider themselves much smarter than their users keep arguing in these absolutes about programmers like their skills are easily classified. Many things have become popular that were originally written like ass by someone who was better at making something people found useful than they were at data structures or thinking in big O. A lot of genius language design people are nearly useless when the whole messy world of shit like network, filesystems and interacting with things not their language is involved. Programmers being human also are not some consistent machines that constantly maintain some level of productivity regardless of what is going on in their personal life or their interests waxing or waning in a given problem space. The people whose code has changed the world are maybe a handful or two. So, astounding developers much better than most do exist. But even they are not some multiple of every coder for every problem. Nevermind, it's time to stop even thinking about programmers alleging truisms about programming and go get my MSNBC|FOX fix so I can get the necessary stimulus to knee jerk.
keanzu 7y ago
If we take a simple application of Price's law: The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work. In a group of 121 the top 11 are doing 10x the work of the other 110.
noicebrewery 7y ago
The author of this article is a 10x self-promoter for using a hotly debated precept to humblebrag about his accomplishments.
nhumrich 7y ago
I find that I am a 10x developer when I compare myself to other versions of myself. I have had days where I honestly feel bad because I got almost nothing done, and other days where I get a ton done. If I was able to correctly channel my focus and effort, I would be 10x then I used to be. Now sure, maybe the time spent not as focused allows me to have those bursts of productivity.
lincpa 7y ago
If you use [The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow v3.0 with Warehouse/Workshop Model](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow), although the development speed will be a little slower, thinking will be a little more, but later reading, incremental development and maintenance will be less than ten times.
mikekchar 7y ago
The reality of the situation is that rather than 10x programmers, there are actually 0.1x programmers. Frequently you will have teams that are so burdened by whatever hurdles are in their way that they produce only a tenth of what they could be producing. Interestingly, there are programmers who self impose those hurdles. There are programmers to impose those hurdles on others as well. Quite frequently, though, the hurdles are either imposed from afar, or occur as a result of unfortunate decision making that has accumulated over a number of years. A real "10x" programmer is a programmer who is able to unshackled themselves from the burdens that turn them into 0.1x programmers. Beware, however, because many of these people achieve their productivity at the expense of others on the team. Indeed, there is a special breed of programmer who will inflict 0.1x burdens on the rest of the team precisely so that they can appear to be a 10x programmer. I once worked on a team of 5000 programmers, where the average number of lines of code produced per programmer per day was 1. We can all argue that KLOC per month is a terrible productivity measure. However when your productivity is around 20 LOC per month (without the K), there is something seriously wrong ;-) 0.01x programmers (at best)????
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Are we talking about a case where a given developer has re-written 100 lines of code, and added 1 line net? Or do you mean that only 1 line was written or re-written? If so, what are people doing, having 7-hour meetings?
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    No. We had 31 million lines of code and it was so complex that even changing 1 line had massive implications. Definitely the worst code base I've ever worked on. I originally started working there as a contractor because they had single functions which had reached the file size limits for their build system and they didn't know what to do (you know... maybe split this function up into smaller functions... maybe...). There were people who were unrolling loops because they were unaware that the compiler would do it for them under the hood. And then somebody would modify one part of that loop, so you'd be looking for some strange behaviour and it would be buried in the middle of some code that was copy and pasted 100 times. Total nightmare. Don't even get me started on how they did their memory allocation.
whateveracct 7y ago
If you're really 10x and you're giving that 10x to some company and not getting 10x value, you're doing yourself a disservice! Either get fair value (probably won't happen) or give them less than that 10x and use your spare energy for other pursuits (relaxing, entrepreneurship, art, hobbies, etc)
DonHopkins 7y ago
It's not that Alan Turing was a 10x or 100x programmer (not that there were many others to compare him to at the time), but that he had a deep intuitive understanding of mathematics, which he could apply to many problems from different fields.
hardwaregeek 7y ago
Y'know, productivity is kind of overrated. The programmers who I admire aren't the people who could implement a React CMS in record time, but the people who built React. Or Rust, or Haskell, or FFmpeg. I guess one could argue that the programmers are 10x, 100x or even (10^n)x simply because their work has helped other programmers become more effective, thus through the multiplier effect resulting in massive productivity. Or because you need someone who can work at 10x to build something of large impact. But first, that just means that Large Impact => 10x, not that 10x => Large Impact. Second, that's oversimplifying a massive, nuanced impact into a number for no real reason. Honestly I suspect the idea of 10x developers was created as a way to explain to managers why you need to pay ol' Leslie over there the big bucks. If you claim Leslie works at 10x the speed and only needs 2x the salary, the math works out for a business major. So I guess that's the reason you need the number.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  If you know which algorithm to use or how to find one, then you can accomplish things with even greater multipliers. But empirically, people with many years of experience that have seen everything aren't valued so maybe it just isn't that valuable. Maybe coordination problems just drown out individual productivity most of the time. Or, looking at it another way, if someone senior (as an IC) hasn't found their way into a position where they have leverage ("impact") already, then they don't have the only (meta-) skill that matters. But then again, when you won't pay people enough to retain them and "Leslie" happens to be the most productive and abhor interviewing, then maybe you end up with literally one person replacing ten.
- terminaljunkid 7y ago
  > If you claim Leslie works at 10x the speed and only needs 2x the salary, the math works out for a business major. So I guess that's the reason you need the number. I think that's perfectly justified. So much is lost in software quality because those people think programming as dry labour and outsource to cheap sources, losing so much in future revenues but unfortunately that's not even measurable. Joel Spolsky put it nicely in a post: It is not that it requires `n` bad programmers to do what one good programmer does. It is that `n` bad programmers can't build what a good programmer builds, no matter how big `n` is or how much time it takes.
bsaul 7y ago
If you look at it the other way, is there any field where some pro aren’t 10x « better » than other pros, at least by some metrics ? In sport it’s pretty obvious there are, and you can measure it because there’s a « winner » and a « looser » at the end of each game. But i’d imagine it’s there in pretty much anything.
yodsanklai 7y ago
> I think 10x developers, like world-class athletes, musicians, and authors, absolutely do exist. For this question to make sense, one should give a better definition of what constitutes the output of a programmer. In a sense, there are Nx programmers for any arbitrary N because some developers can build things that other can't. But we can't reduce the work of a software engineer to "programming". Most "programmers" today aren't developing some new hobby systems from scratch (it's the easy part IMHO). They work in the context of a team, they have to deal with legacy code (possibly boring, using technologies they don't like), they write doc, review code, discuss designs and solutions, they give talks to present their work, they train or supervise colleagues, they interact with difficult managers or colleagues and so on... In that context, I wonder how "star programmers" operate. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are even under-performers.
xornor 7y ago
It is very easy to find -10x programmers, which proves that there are also 10x programmers. It depends on the reference skill level.
xtf 7y ago
Problem is the scale. Script kiddies and junior programmers are 0.1x to 0.6x or people reinventing the wheel by not using a framework, they could be far less and let's not talk about security. Experienced (senior) devs should be counted as 1x. Beside knowing to programming fast, they (should) know how programm more correctly.
marcus_holmes 7y ago
I think part of the objection to 10x programmers is around expectations, self-assessment, and attitudes. There are people out there who have difficulty working with others. Some of those people feel that this difficulty is because they're so FUCKING SMART and the others are morons who are beneath them. They're extremely difficult to work with in a team environment, but come across as completely confident about their own abilities. These people are toxic to work with. They drag everyone else in the team down (part of the reason they are productive is that everyone else has to spend time and effort dealing with their bullshit). Management should spot this and deal with it. But in a lot of situations the "10x" has managed to get into a position where they have a lot of information that the rest of the team doesn't have (deliberately, usually) and getting rid of them would be difficult. And some managers buy into the whole myth as well, and having a toxic "10x" on their team that they have to carefully manage is a point of pride, or something. This archetype, the lone genius developer who is 10x everyone else, is extremely appealing to some people. Regardless of their actual ability, they start believing that they are this. And worse, behaving like this. So while, yes, there are some programmers out there who are very productive, the majority of self-proclaimed "10x programmers" you're actually likely to meet are just socially unaware assholes with inflated egos.
- deleted 7y ago
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- sub7 7y ago
  Disagree with this. There are absolutely 10x and even 50x engineers out there. Yes they almost always have egos and people complain about them all the time. But they also build the right product at the right time for the right user and do the work of an entire product + engineering team - often much faster. Most large, successful companies today have a handful of these guys among the first 20 employees.
  - Traster 7y ago
    This is part of the problem, we (mostly) all agree there actually are 10x and 50x engineers, but there are some people that are conflating 10x execution is being 10x the dickhead. Look in this thread, there are plenty of examples of 10x developers who aren't total dicks to the people around them and don't negatively effect everyone else. What we need to do is look at the intersections: There are people who are 10x engineers (Peter Norvig) -great. There are 10x engineers who are dicks to the people around them (Linus Torvalds). There are people who think they're 10x engineers but aren't, which are fine (let's be kind as use me as an example) and there are people who think they're 10x engineers who aren't - but are dickheads because of it. Even if you are a 10x engineer, you shouldn't be a dick - because it's demonstrable that you don't have to be a dick to be a 10x engineer. I would say it's pretty obvious that the group of people who think they're a 10x engineer and act like a dick is way bigger than the number of actual 10x engineers. That's what I see in the programming community general - everyone has the story of some guy who thinks he's a rockstar but is actually just making everyone's lives hell. Now if you don't actually know if someone is a 10x-er you've got a group of possible 10x-ers and its polluted by this large pool of people who really are dicks, and really aren't a 10xer
jpswade 7y ago
Being a 10x programmer is not sustainable and doesn’t scale well. A great team is not made up of lone rangers and wild stallions.
helsinkiandrew 7y ago
The best way to carry 8 gallons of milk across a muddy field in a leather bag is to leave it in the cow. I never assumed that the 10x programmer was actually writing 10x the amount of code in the same time but instead knowing how to do something in a 10th of the time, with less risk and cost (by a using a better algorithm, novel approach, or 3rd party package etc). It's the difference between being a developer and a programmer
d--b 7y ago
He’s saying 10x developers are those won’t don’t code 10 times faster the same code, but those who find ways to code 10x less for the same results. that I agree with. But then he compares 10x developers to world class athletes... That’s a bad comparison. The 10x developer is the guy who takes the bus instead of running marathon!
koonsolo 7y ago
I've been a 10x developer compared to my yesterday self. I needed to add a feature that required a big rewrite of my framework. This would take maybe 2 weeks. The next day I realized I could support that exact same user benefit with only a few lines of code. Sometimes just looking at the problem differently, or sleeping over it can have a huge impact, not only compared to other developers, but also to yourself.
SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
> I developed them in 3 days, by writing a C program to automatically generate the range of tests. So they were 10X at that task. Are they like that, consistently, all the time? Maybe next time it's another person's turn to have the insight on how to drastically simplify the task. This is not "10x people" at all then. This is a "10x day" or a "10x week" in a fairly normal person.
NohatCoder 7y ago
I don't know if there is truly such a thing as a 10x programmer, but I have no doubt that 0.1x programmers exist in hordes. Even people who at small scale seem competent can often end up making a complicated mess when dealing with bigger projects.
dustinmoris 7y ago
This whole 10x programmers debate is tiring. Why do we even argue over such a dumb thing? OF COURSE THEY EXIST. That is not even debatable. It's a fact of life that there are people who can achieve more than others. It is the case in sports, in politics, in school, and not surprisingly also in tech. You have football players who play their entire life and they don't progress beyond a hobby team and then you've got the likes of Christiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. The question is does it give a 10x dev a justification to behave like a dig? No, it doesn't. You still have to be a good team player, just like in a football team a 10x player won't perform well if he/she is pissing off the rest of the team. So can we stop debabting about facts of life and just get on with it?
- lazarljubenovic 7y ago
  I never understood the concept of 10x apart from it being a (misused) meme. For (almost) every developer you can find one that will do "the thing" a few times faster and one that will do it a few times slower. It also depends on what is "the thing".
  - anthonypasq 7y ago
    This is another example of this delusion people have about specificity when comparing outliers to normal people. Genius level programmers are better than you at everything related to computer science. And if they aren't familiar with it, they will become familiar with it in a fraction of the time and then easily surpass you. This is why we call human intelligence 'general'. Because it applies everywhere. Unless you think your ability to do your job is entirely dependent on tooling and learned knowledge, smarter people will quickly become better than you.
ten_xer 7y ago
As a 10x programmer myself (NOT TO BRAG) I will tell you we definitely exist. My greatest annoyance is watching the rest of you peons crawl along at a snails pace while I am inventing the next groundbreaking technology that will completely flip your existence upside down. Perhaps the only person who could even understand my level of motivation is Elon Musk, but I'm not even sure if I would have the patience to explain it to him. It is a daily occurrence that while you are trying to find a missing semicolon that I'm already cleverly arranging your old commits using git rebase to turn your finger-painting into a Van Gogh. My only advice is just to get used to it, because we aren't going away. The best thing you can do is hope to get a management role so that you can be freed from the burden of competing with us. Let's be frank: most of us 10x programmers are on the deep end of the spectrum and therefore won't want or perform well in a management role, but for those of us that can, managing normal programmers would be excruciating.
- slowhand09 7y ago
  This guy is so 10X his/her user didn't exist before this response. And he's been 10X and productive talking about it!
- abc_lisper 7y ago
  Can't tell if this is /s or real.
- sitkack 7y ago
  Linkedin request sent.
kunglao 7y ago
Considering how software development has become relatively lucrative and so many want to throw themselves at this, it's bound to create a large pool of incompetent engineers. Specially because this isn't an industry that is regulated like medical doctors or architects. Given that, I think it should be relatively easy to find 10x performers on different teams. However, to find a 10x guy in a high-performing team, that'd be a sight :)

248 points by payne92 7y ago

10x programmer @ 1x pay

They are rare, but definitely out there. I've worked with one, managed one, never been one. One charateristic I observed over these 2, they'd take a manual home and read it over a day or two. They'd retain most of it. They tend to be touch typist not needing to look at the keyboard often. This reduces context switching and lets them flow when they are being creative. They know and remember syntax, library routines and interfaces so they aren't stopping to look things up. They "try on the fly", fail fast and often, and move to alternatives when blocked. The ones I know I'd love to start a company with. But I would be the bottleneck...

tanseydavid 7y ago

10X programmers do exist but good luck finding them as Job Seekers. It is also a concept which is NOT SCALABLE.

Eridrus 7y ago

One thing I have observed recently is the existence of "10X projects". This might be a symptom of working at a big company, but I have been really impressed by the ability of some projects to achieve their ends while others get stuck in quagmires due to the fault of nobody on the project per se, but rather the definition of the project itself.

remmargorp64 7y ago

10X programmers DO exist. They aren't just a myth, and they aren't just about knowing when to buy vs build, or when to use a particular framework or toolkit, or how to "mentor" other developers. Chris Sawyer wrote 99% of the code for RollerCoaster Tycoon in x86 assembly language, with the remaining one percent written in C. RollerCoaster Tycoon was a beautiful game which still stands the test of time to this day. The fact that a single person was able to build a blockbuster-level game almost entirely by themselves in assembly is a truly impressive feat which very few programmers would even dream of undertaking. Being a "real" 10X programmer is like being a savant. It's about being FUCKING SMART, and it's about being able to deliver a working, polished product in the same time that a normal team of ten people would be able to deliver it (or in a tenth of the time that a single person might).

collyw 7y ago
Surely it depends a lot on the project. When I wrote the system myself then I was a 10x developer. Now I am working on someone else's code i am not.
- username90 7y ago
  > When I wrote the system myself then I was a 10x developer. Where you 10x more productive than other developers writing systems themselves?
  - collyw 7y ago
    No that's the point. I currently work on a system that is written by someone else. He fixes bugs a lot quicker than me, as he has a lot clearer mental model. I need to reverse engineer ideas from code a lot of the time.
zweep 7y ago
And there’s a 1000x programmer who doesn’t deliver something that a team of 1000 people would create, they deliver something that a 1000 person team couldn’t create in their wildest dreams. Dennis Ritchie, Jeff Dean, etc.
kwhat4 7y ago
You are right, they do exist... but they are probably not producing what you expect. I have had the privileged of coming into companies that had a programmer who wrote 10x more code than everyone else at the organization. Unfortunately, the vast majority of this code was not maintainable, riddled with bugs and had several critical security vulnerabilities in it. Good programmers are not programmers that create 1000s of lines of code an hour with no thought to maintainability. If that were the case, we would have 500 million programmers in India cranking out the worlds best code. Any time I hear an organization talk about a 10x/Rockstar/1% developer, I run the other way as fast as possible.
bluetwo 7y ago
I agree they exist. The article does too, at the end: ...highly productive developers (10x or otherwise) are problem-solving at a much higher level. Their productivity won’t be apparent from a narrow test, any more than the overall skill of a world-class football player would be apparent from (say) how fast they could run the 100m dash. The most productive developers are solving big problems, and are bringing judgment and experience to bear on essential design, architecture, and “build vs use existing library” decisions. They’re designing key abstractions that will pay dividends through the life of the project...

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amznthrowaway5 7y ago

> highly productive developers (10x or otherwise) are problem-solving at a much higher level This is a very important point, but calling these highly productive developers "10x" doesn't really make sense. They are more like "infinity times" compared to the average when it comes to getting a difficult task done, since the average developer would just get stuck and never be able to invent good designs and solve the difficult problems. Even worse, some programmers are in the negative on many tasks, adding additional complexity and overhead while making little to no positive contributions, especially when you give them a problem beyond their capabilities.

wpasc 7y ago
Joel Spolsky's "Hitting the high notes" always comes to mind for me when this debate arises.
- teddyh 7y ago
  Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Spolsky is a 10x blogger. Neither he nor any of his employees were ever 10x programmers. There was nothing algorithmically clever about FogBugz or CityDesk or whatever.
  - lolc 7y ago
    Did you miss how they cross-compiled Vbscript to PHP? I'd say for a lot of programmers this would have been quite the challenge, algorithmically speaking. And I would classify it as clever. With both the positive and negative connotations of the word.
SKILNER 7y ago
Yes, it's this simple. The important point is that some things are just beyond the ability of average programmers, let alone, bad programmers. There are some things that only top programmers are able to actually finish before the end of the universe.

e1g 7y ago

I think we instinctively recognize the outsized levels of certain pros: a 10x leader that is a different creature from a typical manager, or a captivating writer that is 10x better than the average novelist, or a 10x actor vs a standard-issue LA newcomer, or a 10x teacher who inspires far beyond what curriculum mandates. Can we accept 10x lawyers, coaches, artists, or musicians based on their impact? We do, and we seek and celebrate them. Why fashion designers but not app designers, why essay writers but not program writers?

loopz 7y ago

What have the company done in the past 15 years to build a progressive learning culture?

gilbetron 7y ago

The concept of the 10x programmer seems to have been drifted from its original meaning. It isn't that there's a coder that is 10x better than a good coder. It is that a lot of people are really bad at their jobs, and a coder that thinks and learns about problems can be far better than those people. It comes from terrible "corporate drone" software developers in the 80s and 90s - the ones that would takes weeks to developer simple routines. Bring in someone that loves software dev, and they appear magical. Today, with Google and Stack Overflow, that gap has diminished, but there is definitely people still way better than "average" developers. However, if you have someone that keeps their skills sharp and their problem solving desire sharper, you won't fine anyone 10x - maybe 2 or 3x, at best.

starpilot 7y ago
Yeah, I can understand the "10x programmer" back when fizzbuzz was still being asked of CS graduates. Not anymore.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  To be honest, I didn't know that one... I just did basic double division the first time I saw it (into a float and compared it against an int casted back to a float). Someone in the interview room asked my if I remembered modulo and I was like 'oh yea, it gives you the remainder'
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    That operator's one I've used more on puzzles than in real life, where I've used it few enough times in 15ish years that I could count them on one hand. I think it only sticks in my mind because, for whatever reason, it was taught early and with some emphasis in a Perl book I read when I was starting out. If not for that I could well fail to come up with a reasonably "correct" solution to FizzBuzz.
  - khrbrt 7y ago
    That's honestly more impressive for creativity sake! FizzBuzz is just an example of the general problem of "given a set of things, do something to a subset of those things" which comes up often in real world settings. If you knew enough to set up a loop and apply some conditional inside of it, then you passed better than some of the programmers I've worked with.

liamcardenas 7y ago

Why wouldn’t there be such thing as a 10x programmer? Is the average programmer so good? There are outliers in every industry. Professional athletes are a clear example — they are often many orders of magnitude better than the average player of their respective sport. There are probably also a few 100x engineers, maybe someone like Elon.

paublyrne 7y ago
The equivalent comparison would be professional athletes at the top of their sport to other professional athletes in that sport working or playing in a lower league. Would the the top performers be 10x the other ones? Hard to quantify this, but I'd say no, more like 2x or at most 3x
- thoman23 7y ago
  All you have to do is look at someone like LeBron. He single-handedly makes a team a championship contender.

WalterBright 7y ago

I personally know many programmers who are easily 10x average programmers. No question about it. They crank out code that is easy to read, easy to understand, works right out of the box, and gives years of trouble-free operation. Sean Parent is one of those programmers. It's pretty obvious when he describes how he replaced a nightmarish tangle of code that re-invented a simple rotate algorithm. It's a remarkable talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2tWOdzgXHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2tWOdzgXHA

paulus_magnus2 7y ago

Can we stop the self hate already? There definitely are 10x musicians, 10x painters, sportsmen and 10x programmers. You know what never exists in 10x form? Burocrats and middle managers who write articles like this one. I suggest to flag this as fake news and all future articles intended to devalue young talented programmers who yet are to discover their true market value.

michaelbuckbee 7y ago
Not trying to be a jerk, but I think you might need to re-read the article as the author is clearly a developer themselves and thinks that there are definitely 10x developers (just that they can't be found with a simple coding test).
- Bnshsysjab 7y ago
  I would like to think I’m one of them, I’d flail about in attempt to solve some random programmer test, but I’m also the guy that sits back and says ‘hey how about we rethink this i n s a n e architecture?’
teddyh 7y ago
I think you missed the double negative in the title.
kylec 7y ago
I'll bet 10x managers do exist, but they quickly become VPs or CEOs
- lordofgibbons 7y ago
  By that reasoning, for all practical purposes, they don't really exist. They were already rare to begin with but then they also move up the ranks quickly. One could argue VPs and CEOs technically have people reporting to them, but managing people isn't really their job. They are mostly concerned with strategy.
emmelaich 7y ago

ccheever 7y ago

I think the way to think about this is that there are some people who figure out ways to do things or invent things that just wouldn't be figured out or discovered by other people. So, it's not 10x or anything-X even, it's just that, if the stuff that can be uniquely provided by "10x" people is important to you, then you need someone like that. 10 1x developers aren't likely to give you that (except to the extent that you have 10 chances to discover that one of them is actually a 10xer on some dimension).

t0astbread 7y ago

It doesn't matter whether 10x programmers exist. Programming is not a sport and as such, competition will only lead to narrow thinking, useless optimization and hatred. What we should really strive for is making programming a more creative activity where people learn from and inspire each other, not a competition. Oh and also, "finding the 10x engineer" feels like a hotspot to inject hidden bias into recruiting.

closeparen 7y ago
Communication overhead is expensive. All else being equal, it’s much better to build a small elite team that can operate successfully with less structure and process, rather than a large average one.
- t0astbread 7y ago
  Right. But you can't build a functioning team that works together and can rely on each other by fostering a culture of competition and hiring only the "predestined" 10x engineers. If the team culture is to help each other, forgive mistakes and learn from each other without measuring who's the best the team will automatically build itself without the need to hire only "10x engineers". Or so I suppose. I'm not an HR person or anyone else with expertise in this field so you should take what I say with a grain of salt. I've just been thinking about this a lot as of late.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    Where I’ve seen teams with high concentrations of unusually smart people, they gelled and collaborated at least as well as anyone else. In fact the bandwidth and fidelity of their idea transfers is part of what made them impressive. It’s like they had their own little language to describe the codebase and what to do with it. These were mature and soft-spoken people; might be different with brash young hotshots.
    - t0astbread 7y ago
      To me that sounds like an environment where there's not a lot of competition involved. (Which is what I was describing.)

gandalfgeek 7y ago

If you look at the original paper (going back to 1968) where the data for a 10x difference was first found, there are a ton of... issues. I've covered this in detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gho89X72Xas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gho89X72Xas

chx 7y ago

I'd argue today a team could be 10x. Yes it requires someone who knows the concepts and can effectively communicate them but also awesome project managers, designers and QA personnel. A great team (I am lucky to be part of one) functions like a well oiled machine churning out acceptably quality features and fixes the problems at a surprising rate.

nybblesio 7y ago

The OP's example is perfect: he didn't go to the leaf-nodes and write each test by hand. Instead, it was clear that writing a tool to do the job would be better. Software is all about leverage. This is what defines a 10x programmer. However, I'm constantly amazed how many programmers fail to see the forest for the trees. To a large extent, not seeing (or seeing and ignoring) this type of solution is learned behavior. Many environments are hostile to this world view. Writing tools (especially those that generate code...eek!) is seen as "over-engineering" and "unnecessary complexity". If you're in a factory, on a line, your job isn't to climb away from your leaf-node. Any programmer has the potential to be 10x, they just have to see and act upon it. Few do.

skybrian 7y ago
It seems like you're almost debating yourself here, making arguments for opposite sides. If anyone could do it and environmental effects make all the difference, why emphasize individual initiative? But maybe the best thing to do would be to find a better environment, if you can?

CognitiveLens 7y ago

It's worth pointing out that the research found a 10x _spread_ between the least-productive and most-productive engineers - a '10xer' isn't someone who does ten times more than the average, so it becomes less mythical if you think about someone who does, e.g. 2x more than average in an organization with a few burned out engineers doing 20% of the average.

odyssey7 7y ago
Ah, so the secret to having a bunch of 5x engineers is to not burn them out.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 7y ago

I remember one programmer that I characterised with "He writes a lot of code". I ended up with one of his not small routines that I replaced with a one page assembler routine in MVS NIP rather than OPEN. When reworking printing software to support multi color, I researched a commonly used subroutine though several layers of calls and replaced it with, yes, a single character constant. I lost count of the many legacy applications where I tossed out great gobs of code produced by "productive" programmers.

RealityVoid 7y ago
I do not think 10x means "churns out code" but rather "produces results". And by this metric, by golly, there are a couple 10x out there for sure.
- prostheticvamp 7y ago
  I think OP here was asserting that he was 10x in comparison to that guy, as being much more efficient.
james_s_tayler 7y ago
10x is also about quality. Not raw output. A lot of times the really fast devs are fast because they don't stop to consider how they can do things in a fundamentally much better way, they just churn out the status quo as fast as possible. Those type are not 10x.

jimbokun 7y ago

Here is your 10x programmer: https://norvig.com/sudoku.html https://norvig.com/sudoku.html "In this essay I tackle the problem of solving every Sudoku puzzle. It turns out to be quite easy (about one page of code for the main idea and two pages for embellishments) using two ideas: constraint propagation and search." If you gave this task to an "average" developer, how long would it take for them to implement? How many lines of code would it be? Would the implementation be correct? How long would their code take to execute? % python sudo.py All tests pass. Solved 50 of 50 easy puzzles (avg 0.01 secs (86 Hz), max 0.03 secs). Solved 95 of 95 hard puzzles (avg 0.04 secs (24 Hz), max 0.18 secs). Solved 11 of 11 hardest puzzles (avg 0.01 secs (71 Hz), max 0.02 secs). Solved 99 of 99 random puzzles (avg 0.01 secs (85 Hz), max 0.02 secs). Does the average developer know what "constraint propagation" and "search" mean in the above sense, or remember enough about them from their CS class to recognize them as the right tools and how to implement them? Also, can the average developer implement a spell checker from scratch on a single transcontinental flight? https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html So Norvig is always the paradigmatic example of the 10x developer, for me. Having a broad range of CS techniques at your disposal and knowing how and when to deploy them, is almost a super power.

zzzeek 7y ago
Norvig's work in those questions are more like the 100x developer category.
mjw1007 7y ago
I'm sure Norvig is very good, but I think the sudoku webpage is presenting a finished program in an idealised way, not recording the process he used to write it, false starts and all. (It seems likely to me that there were some false starts, because eliminate() returns either `values` or False, when both of its callers would be just as happy if it returned True or False.)
- deleted 7y ago
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- jimbokun 7y ago

petilon 7y ago

10x programmers do exist. But here's the thing: its not worth being a 10x programmer. Managers don't necessarily want them. First of all, if you complete a project 10x faster than the expected time, managers will assume that they had overestimated the project, as opposed to recognizing that you're a 10x programmer. I have seen this time after time after time. Secondly, if a manager does recognize that you're a 10x programmer then you will be seen as a risk: what happens if you leave the company? If the product was built by a team then that's a legit business. If the product was built by just 1 person then that's not a legit business as the business can suddenly collapse if that 1 person leaves. Third, you make your co-workers look bad by raising the expectations bar. You will not win any popularity contests. You may make your manager look bad too, if your performance diminishes the value of the manager. If you're indeed a highly capable programmer here's my advice: don't be a 10x programmer by doing 10x the quantity of work or completing projects in 1/10th the time. Instead be a 1.1x programmer, then expend your remaining energy helping your teammates grow, and broadening your influence. (So scale yourself horizontally instead of vertically.) This advice is often not easy to heed if you're introverted, and if you're extroverted you are already a manager instead of a programmer.

EduardoBautista 7y ago
I recommend going into consulting/contracting. A lot of money to be earned if you are really productive.
chillacy 7y ago
There are companies programmers are the ones doing the estimating, project managers hold them accountable, and managers dish out promotions and convey priorities.
RHSeeger 7y ago
> then expend your remaining energy helping your teammates grow, and broadening your influence All through reading this thread, my thought was that I'd rather be a force multiplier than a 10x programmer. I'd rather make an entire team write better, more maintainable code than just do more of the code myself. Past a certain point, the force multiplier adds more overall, plus their influence results in less _bad_ code, they raise the minimum bar.

1e-9 7y ago

Harder problem => Increased productivity variance For extremely hard problems, it's not difficult to measure greater than 10X differences between highly-talented senior developers and the average productivity of those capable of meeting requirements.

bloody-crow 7y ago

I think team sports is a good analogy here. There's no people who are 10x stronger, or who can run 10x faster than their teammates, but there's certainly people who'd score 10x points in certain circumstances than anybody else, and that is what 10x programmer is about.

james_s_tayler 7y ago
Team sports is a terrible analogy. Like someone else mentioned, software is about leverage. There is no leverage in team sports.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

There are 10x salespeople, 10x authors, 10x basketball players, and 10x scientists; why should there not be 10x programmers?

thoman23 7y ago

A few people have touched on it here, but I'll add my voice. I firmly believe that there are programmers who are better described as a "1 vs. 0" programmer. Some programmers have a creative talent in them that leads them to create elegant solutions that literally a team of 50 average programmers would not.

deleted 7y ago

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DantesKite 7y ago

Despite the differences in definition, reading the comments on this page has been lovely. I’ve enjoyed the many perspectives.

overgard 7y ago

I agree with the article, but I also think it leaves out something fairly important, which is minimizing huge time sinks. Instead of being 10x better, how can you reduce wasted time 10x? I remember working with this one guy that was light years smarter than me, but if you watched him use the IDE it was painful. He did everything in the menus, slowly. How much of his life could he have back from memorizing f5 and a couple other shortcuts? Maybe you could reduce waste in various ways: * Learn keyboard shortcuts instead of pecking through menus * Use search instead of browsing (especially with keyboard shortcuts!) * Have you ever lost half a day debugging something that turned out to be dumb? (I have!) Is there a way to modify your coding style or your testing habits so you never hit that again? * Do you know your stack well enough that (given the time) you could reimplement the same ideas yourself? (Or is it a magic box that you can't debug? How much time and effort do you spend prodding the magic box?) * Have you automated all the manual things you currently do? * Are you wasting a lot of time dealing with bad abstractions when something much more basic would suffice? * Are you mastering your tools/languages/frameworks, or are you switching around so often that you spend a lot of time looking things up? * Do you have input into how your tasks are written, or are you stuck with whatever breakdown someone else came up with? Is your work getting awkwardly twisted to fit into these milestones? Can you work out a better system with your leads? That's the tip of the ice berg -- I think if you look at almost anything you do, you can generally find some aspect of it that's cumbersome and wasting your time. I feel like when you account for wasted effort/time, and removing it, becoming "10x" starts to seem a lot more reasonable -- it's not about being a genius, it's about being introspective and careful about how you perform your work. It saddens me to say this, but I think that sort of introspection is rare. I see so many programmers doing uncomfortable awkward things every day, because it's only like 10 extra seconds, except those 10 seconds times 20 times a day times a year and now that cost is out of control

wvenable 7y ago
If you think 10x programmers are merely more efficient and writing code, you're wrong. A 10x programmer produces 10x less code to solve the problem which is why they're 10x faster at it and the quality if higher. Some of this advice is good but actually being speedy is not necessary.
7y ago

sunstone 7y ago

To make an analogy with the ancient Roman trieme ships with three tiers of rowers. A 10x rower in that context is not the guy who can pull the oar 10 times harder, it's the guy who, while he can pull the oar, can also tell you when the ship is on course because he knows how to navigate and thereby makes everyone's effort more efficient.

cmhnn 7y ago

How does an industry so full of brilliant people who consider themselves much smarter than their users keep arguing in these absolutes about programmers like their skills are easily classified. Many things have become popular that were originally written like ass by someone who was better at making something people found useful than they were at data structures or thinking in big O. A lot of genius language design people are nearly useless when the whole messy world of shit like network, filesystems and interacting with things not their language is involved. Programmers being human also are not some consistent machines that constantly maintain some level of productivity regardless of what is going on in their personal life or their interests waxing or waning in a given problem space. The people whose code has changed the world are maybe a handful or two. So, astounding developers much better than most do exist. But even they are not some multiple of every coder for every problem. Nevermind, it's time to stop even thinking about programmers alleging truisms about programming and go get my MSNBC|FOX fix so I can get the necessary stimulus to knee jerk.

keanzu 7y ago

If we take a simple application of Price's law: The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work. In a group of 121 the top 11 are doing 10x the work of the other 110.

noicebrewery 7y ago

The author of this article is a 10x self-promoter for using a hotly debated precept to humblebrag about his accomplishments.

nhumrich 7y ago

I find that I am a 10x developer when I compare myself to other versions of myself. I have had days where I honestly feel bad because I got almost nothing done, and other days where I get a ton done. If I was able to correctly channel my focus and effort, I would be 10x then I used to be. Now sure, maybe the time spent not as focused allows me to have those bursts of productivity.

lincpa 7y ago

If you use [The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow v3.0 with Warehouse/Workshop Model](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow), although the development speed will be a little slower, thinking will be a little more, but later reading, incremental development and maintenance will be less than ten times.

mikekchar 7y ago

The reality of the situation is that rather than 10x programmers, there are actually 0.1x programmers. Frequently you will have teams that are so burdened by whatever hurdles are in their way that they produce only a tenth of what they could be producing. Interestingly, there are programmers who self impose those hurdles. There are programmers to impose those hurdles on others as well. Quite frequently, though, the hurdles are either imposed from afar, or occur as a result of unfortunate decision making that has accumulated over a number of years. A real "10x" programmer is a programmer who is able to unshackled themselves from the burdens that turn them into 0.1x programmers. Beware, however, because many of these people achieve their productivity at the expense of others on the team. Indeed, there is a special breed of programmer who will inflict 0.1x burdens on the rest of the team precisely so that they can appear to be a 10x programmer. I once worked on a team of 5000 programmers, where the average number of lines of code produced per programmer per day was 1. We can all argue that KLOC per month is a terrible productivity measure. However when your productivity is around 20 LOC per month (without the K), there is something seriously wrong ;-) 0.01x programmers (at best)????

ClumsyPilot 7y ago
Are we talking about a case where a given developer has re-written 100 lines of code, and added 1 line net? Or do you mean that only 1 line was written or re-written? If so, what are people doing, having 7-hour meetings?
- mikekchar 7y ago
  No. We had 31 million lines of code and it was so complex that even changing 1 line had massive implications. Definitely the worst code base I've ever worked on. I originally started working there as a contractor because they had single functions which had reached the file size limits for their build system and they didn't know what to do (you know... maybe split this function up into smaller functions... maybe...). There were people who were unrolling loops because they were unaware that the compiler would do it for them under the hood. And then somebody would modify one part of that loop, so you'd be looking for some strange behaviour and it would be buried in the middle of some code that was copy and pasted 100 times. Total nightmare. Don't even get me started on how they did their memory allocation.

whateveracct 7y ago

If you're really 10x and you're giving that 10x to some company and not getting 10x value, you're doing yourself a disservice! Either get fair value (probably won't happen) or give them less than that 10x and use your spare energy for other pursuits (relaxing, entrepreneurship, art, hobbies, etc)

DonHopkins 7y ago

It's not that Alan Turing was a 10x or 100x programmer (not that there were many others to compare him to at the time), but that he had a deep intuitive understanding of mathematics, which he could apply to many problems from different fields.

hardwaregeek 7y ago

Y'know, productivity is kind of overrated. The programmers who I admire aren't the people who could implement a React CMS in record time, but the people who built React. Or Rust, or Haskell, or FFmpeg. I guess one could argue that the programmers are 10x, 100x or even (10^n)x simply because their work has helped other programmers become more effective, thus through the multiplier effect resulting in massive productivity. Or because you need someone who can work at 10x to build something of large impact. But first, that just means that Large Impact => 10x, not that 10x => Large Impact. Second, that's oversimplifying a massive, nuanced impact into a number for no real reason. Honestly I suspect the idea of 10x developers was created as a way to explain to managers why you need to pay ol' Leslie over there the big bucks. If you claim Leslie works at 10x the speed and only needs 2x the salary, the math works out for a business major. So I guess that's the reason you need the number.

perl4ever 7y ago
If you know which algorithm to use or how to find one, then you can accomplish things with even greater multipliers. But empirically, people with many years of experience that have seen everything aren't valued so maybe it just isn't that valuable. Maybe coordination problems just drown out individual productivity most of the time. Or, looking at it another way, if someone senior (as an IC) hasn't found their way into a position where they have leverage ("impact") already, then they don't have the only (meta-) skill that matters. But then again, when you won't pay people enough to retain them and "Leslie" happens to be the most productive and abhor interviewing, then maybe you end up with literally one person replacing ten.
terminaljunkid 7y ago
> If you claim Leslie works at 10x the speed and only needs 2x the salary, the math works out for a business major. So I guess that's the reason you need the number. I think that's perfectly justified. So much is lost in software quality because those people think programming as dry labour and outsource to cheap sources, losing so much in future revenues but unfortunately that's not even measurable. Joel Spolsky put it nicely in a post: It is not that it requires `n` bad programmers to do what one good programmer does. It is that `n` bad programmers can't build what a good programmer builds, no matter how big `n` is or how much time it takes.

bsaul 7y ago

If you look at it the other way, is there any field where some pro aren’t 10x « better » than other pros, at least by some metrics ? In sport it’s pretty obvious there are, and you can measure it because there’s a « winner » and a « looser » at the end of each game. But i’d imagine it’s there in pretty much anything.

yodsanklai 7y ago

> I think 10x developers, like world-class athletes, musicians, and authors, absolutely do exist. For this question to make sense, one should give a better definition of what constitutes the output of a programmer. In a sense, there are Nx programmers for any arbitrary N because some developers can build things that other can't. But we can't reduce the work of a software engineer to "programming". Most "programmers" today aren't developing some new hobby systems from scratch (it's the easy part IMHO). They work in the context of a team, they have to deal with legacy code (possibly boring, using technologies they don't like), they write doc, review code, discuss designs and solutions, they give talks to present their work, they train or supervise colleagues, they interact with difficult managers or colleagues and so on... In that context, I wonder how "star programmers" operate. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are even under-performers.

xornor 7y ago

It is very easy to find -10x programmers, which proves that there are also 10x programmers. It depends on the reference skill level.

xtf 7y ago

Problem is the scale. Script kiddies and junior programmers are 0.1x to 0.6x or people reinventing the wheel by not using a framework, they could be far less and let's not talk about security. Experienced (senior) devs should be counted as 1x. Beside knowing to programming fast, they (should) know how programm more correctly.

marcus_holmes 7y ago

I think part of the objection to 10x programmers is around expectations, self-assessment, and attitudes. There are people out there who have difficulty working with others. Some of those people feel that this difficulty is because they're so FUCKING SMART and the others are morons who are beneath them. They're extremely difficult to work with in a team environment, but come across as completely confident about their own abilities. These people are toxic to work with. They drag everyone else in the team down (part of the reason they are productive is that everyone else has to spend time and effort dealing with their bullshit). Management should spot this and deal with it. But in a lot of situations the "10x" has managed to get into a position where they have a lot of information that the rest of the team doesn't have (deliberately, usually) and getting rid of them would be difficult. And some managers buy into the whole myth as well, and having a toxic "10x" on their team that they have to carefully manage is a point of pride, or something. This archetype, the lone genius developer who is 10x everyone else, is extremely appealing to some people. Regardless of their actual ability, they start believing that they are this. And worse, behaving like this. So while, yes, there are some programmers out there who are very productive, the majority of self-proclaimed "10x programmers" you're actually likely to meet are just socially unaware assholes with inflated egos.

deleted 7y ago
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sub7 7y ago
Disagree with this. There are absolutely 10x and even 50x engineers out there. Yes they almost always have egos and people complain about them all the time. But they also build the right product at the right time for the right user and do the work of an entire product + engineering team - often much faster. Most large, successful companies today have a handful of these guys among the first 20 employees.
- Traster 7y ago
  This is part of the problem, we (mostly) all agree there actually are 10x and 50x engineers, but there are some people that are conflating 10x execution is being 10x the dickhead. Look in this thread, there are plenty of examples of 10x developers who aren't total dicks to the people around them and don't negatively effect everyone else. What we need to do is look at the intersections: There are people who are 10x engineers (Peter Norvig) -great. There are 10x engineers who are dicks to the people around them (Linus Torvalds). There are people who think they're 10x engineers but aren't, which are fine (let's be kind as use me as an example) and there are people who think they're 10x engineers who aren't - but are dickheads because of it. Even if you are a 10x engineer, you shouldn't be a dick - because it's demonstrable that you don't have to be a dick to be a 10x engineer. I would say it's pretty obvious that the group of people who think they're a 10x engineer and act like a dick is way bigger than the number of actual 10x engineers. That's what I see in the programming community general - everyone has the story of some guy who thinks he's a rockstar but is actually just making everyone's lives hell. Now if you don't actually know if someone is a 10x-er you've got a group of possible 10x-ers and its polluted by this large pool of people who really are dicks, and really aren't a 10xer

jpswade 7y ago

Being a 10x programmer is not sustainable and doesn’t scale well. A great team is not made up of lone rangers and wild stallions.

helsinkiandrew 7y ago

The best way to carry 8 gallons of milk across a muddy field in a leather bag is to leave it in the cow. I never assumed that the 10x programmer was actually writing 10x the amount of code in the same time but instead knowing how to do something in a 10th of the time, with less risk and cost (by a using a better algorithm, novel approach, or 3rd party package etc). It's the difference between being a developer and a programmer

d--b 7y ago

He’s saying 10x developers are those won’t don’t code 10 times faster the same code, but those who find ways to code 10x less for the same results. that I agree with. But then he compares 10x developers to world class athletes... That’s a bad comparison. The 10x developer is the guy who takes the bus instead of running marathon!

koonsolo 7y ago

I've been a 10x developer compared to my yesterday self. I needed to add a feature that required a big rewrite of my framework. This would take maybe 2 weeks. The next day I realized I could support that exact same user benefit with only a few lines of code. Sometimes just looking at the problem differently, or sleeping over it can have a huge impact, not only compared to other developers, but also to yourself.

SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago

> I developed them in 3 days, by writing a C program to automatically generate the range of tests. So they were 10X at that task. Are they like that, consistently, all the time? Maybe next time it's another person's turn to have the insight on how to drastically simplify the task. This is not "10x people" at all then. This is a "10x day" or a "10x week" in a fairly normal person.

NohatCoder 7y ago

I don't know if there is truly such a thing as a 10x programmer, but I have no doubt that 0.1x programmers exist in hordes. Even people who at small scale seem competent can often end up making a complicated mess when dealing with bigger projects.

dustinmoris 7y ago

This whole 10x programmers debate is tiring. Why do we even argue over such a dumb thing? OF COURSE THEY EXIST. That is not even debatable. It's a fact of life that there are people who can achieve more than others. It is the case in sports, in politics, in school, and not surprisingly also in tech. You have football players who play their entire life and they don't progress beyond a hobby team and then you've got the likes of Christiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. The question is does it give a 10x dev a justification to behave like a dig? No, it doesn't. You still have to be a good team player, just like in a football team a 10x player won't perform well if he/she is pissing off the rest of the team. So can we stop debabting about facts of life and just get on with it?

lazarljubenovic 7y ago
I never understood the concept of 10x apart from it being a (misused) meme. For (almost) every developer you can find one that will do "the thing" a few times faster and one that will do it a few times slower. It also depends on what is "the thing".
- anthonypasq 7y ago
  This is another example of this delusion people have about specificity when comparing outliers to normal people. Genius level programmers are better than you at everything related to computer science. And if they aren't familiar with it, they will become familiar with it in a fraction of the time and then easily surpass you. This is why we call human intelligence 'general'. Because it applies everywhere. Unless you think your ability to do your job is entirely dependent on tooling and learned knowledge, smarter people will quickly become better than you.

ten_xer 7y ago

As a 10x programmer myself (NOT TO BRAG) I will tell you we definitely exist. My greatest annoyance is watching the rest of you peons crawl along at a snails pace while I am inventing the next groundbreaking technology that will completely flip your existence upside down. Perhaps the only person who could even understand my level of motivation is Elon Musk, but I'm not even sure if I would have the patience to explain it to him. It is a daily occurrence that while you are trying to find a missing semicolon that I'm already cleverly arranging your old commits using git rebase to turn your finger-painting into a Van Gogh. My only advice is just to get used to it, because we aren't going away. The best thing you can do is hope to get a management role so that you can be freed from the burden of competing with us. Let's be frank: most of us 10x programmers are on the deep end of the spectrum and therefore won't want or perform well in a management role, but for those of us that can, managing normal programmers would be excruciating.

slowhand09 7y ago
This guy is so 10X his/her user didn't exist before this response. And he's been 10X and productive talking about it!
abc_lisper 7y ago
Can't tell if this is /s or real.
sitkack 7y ago
Linkedin request sent.

kunglao 7y ago

Considering how software development has become relatively lucrative and so many want to throw themselves at this, it's bound to create a large pool of incompetent engineers. Specially because this isn't an industry that is regulated like medical doctors or architects. Given that, I think it should be relatively easy to find 10x performers on different teams. However, to find a 10x guy in a high-performing team, that'd be a sight :)