I think this is the closest I've seen to a concise answer to the 10X programmer's advantage. Earlier in my career, I noticed a fellow programmer who was quite n

I think this is the closest I've seen to a concise answer to the 10X programmer's advantage. Earlier in my career, I noticed a fellow programmer who was quite noticeably faster at completing tasks than everyone else including myself. We also had a coding competition and I 'programmed' as fast as he did in direct comparison on the same task. So it turns out, the performance boost was not in raw coding speed but a lot of other things like not being distracted, being ok with a great but not the greatest design, getting to work and avoiding analysis paralysis. A sense of urgency from day one on a project. When competing head to head for a fun competition, many of these things come naturally but when given 'time' it can be easy to fall back to less productive habits when a deadline is months away. Like my mentor Steve Hayes once told me 'hands on keyboard'