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This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x ch

This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at least 99 times out of 100 so must also be 10x in comparison. Marathon runners run 42 km in like two hours but it would take me days to finish the same distance... It's true for almost any human activity that there is a huge gap between the worst, the average, and the best. It is preposterous to believe that the same wouldn't hold true for software development.

z3t4 5y ago
The problem is that you can't measure a developer. So you can't say someone is 10x faster or better. If you add a bench-mark like how many LOC is written per day, most will exceed at that benchmark, but the overall quality will go down.
- cheschire 5y ago
  Schrodinger's project management: developers are measurable as long as they don't know they are being measured.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    Better play it safe and commit more often.
    - jgalentine007 5y ago
      I used to 'craft' commits but more frequent WIPs is what the people (who write the checks) want to see.
  - Lichtso 5y ago
    You might be joking but it actually has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law Well, your idea is probably closer to the Marilyn Strathern definition.
- adolph 5y ago
  Cue the link to the story of Bill Atkinson‘s “-2000 Lines of Code”: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  > So you can't say someone is 10x faster or better You can absolutely measure something. I have a colleague going through this right now - he's got... 24 years of experience in software - mostly web - across multiple problem domains/industries. He's now on a web team with someone who's done windows desktop software for 15 years, someone else who graduated from high school 2 years ago and has never worked anywhere before, someone else who has a few years of some web experience but has never actually shipped anything remotely close to what the team is trying to do. There's more, but... the mgt wants to treat everyone as 'equal' and having an 'equal voice'. So... they need some new web service. "Let's use React! Let's use Dart! Let's use foo!" Mgt: "OK - well... let's have a 'shoot out' - everyone research their ideal and we'll present findings!" My colleague: "Hey - here's this. I got this done in a couple days - there's tests, docs, works with the existing infrastructure, and has some sample data for you to play with". Weeks later, others: "Hey, that's not fair, you already knew some of that. I'm not an expert in $foo, but heard good things about it, and people at google use it, so we should too! I just need a few more months to get up to speed, then I can show the rest of you how good it is and why we should use it." Someone being able to accomplish stated goals in a few days, where other people on the team are not even sure what terms to google... Yes, there are people who are "10x developers".
  - y4mi 5y ago
    That sounds like a senior engineer vs junior engineer experience level. The term 10x engineer is generally used differently. Though I guess the reason for terms like that might just be related to how many inexperienced people get senior level jobs.
    - mgkimsal 5y ago
      The comment I was replying to was "The problem is that you can't measure a developer." You can measure. One way you measure is years of experience. Another can be time to deliver against a spec. Another can be number/size of defects. Another can be time to remedy defects. Yes, it's "junior vs senior", but their management is explicitly stating "everyone's experience is relevant, and everyone has an equal voice" and so on. No, the person who has literally never contributed to a production codebase should not have an equal say in the technology stack choice. Their voice is not 'equal' to someone who has delivered consistently for 2 decades. And... yes, it's largely bad management. He's looking to move. They had rocky mgt for... a year before, but it was tolerable. Leadership changed and my colleague stuck around the last few months to see if things would get better, but they're getting worse.
- namdnay 5y ago
  You can't "measure" a session musician either. And yet some of them take hundreds of dollars an hour to be there for a recording, so clearly there is a way to know
  - RHSman2 5y ago
    If a session musician charges by the hour you know they aren’t good OR haven’t been recognized yet. Day rates.
    - namdnay 5y ago
      When a wise man points at the moon, an idiot looks at his finger
  - z3t4 5y ago
    We are exposed to music so much that even someone who don't know how to play an instrument can tell the difference. So the average Joe can tell the difference in for example talent shows. Now imagine a talent show with programmers/developers, we kinda have that already with hackatons, but then it becomes more about the presentation, the actual code - if any code exist at all - is an absolute "hack".
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- trashtester 5y ago
  Sometimes you can. At some point I worked as a consultant assisting a team that actually picked the next item from the backlog as their next task. All tasks were estimated before they were put in the backlog and assigned to someone. I would usually finish tasks in less than 30% of the esimated time, while some would use 3x+ the estimated time, and then only because they were receiving assistance a couple of hours per week. The guy doing the estimages was evaluated based on his ability to estimate accurately, so he had to inflate the estimates beyond what would be reasonable. This was in a country with really good job protection laws....
temp8964 5y ago
"myth" is just another ruined word.
smoldesu 5y ago
The only reason DOOM was finished in 1997 was because John Carmack recognized himself as the 10x developer and started living in-office until the game was finished. Obviously it's important to not let silly titles distract you, but stepping up to the plate like this is how organizations get stuff done.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  And while there’s nothing wrong with people choosing to do that, there’s absolutely everything wrong with organisations that expect it.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    Yes! This is how bad organisations get stuff done. Good organisations don't run into these problems in the first place because they listen to their staff and don't set arbitrary deadlines* * I have no idea how arbitrary the deadline for Doom was. But I've seen so many devs burn themselves out meeting deadlines that were pulled out of a hat by managers because it gave them the illusion of control
  - trashtester 5y ago
    Most real 10x's work precisely when they decide to. If they are mistreated by their employer, other stand in line to hire them. The crunch problem mostly applies to the average-and-below developers (possibly with the exception of some devs that give up leverage vs their employer somehow, by depending on them for a visa, only consider work in a given industry, etc)
latch 5y ago
I totally agree, but I think you can use examples closer to home. Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics (quality, cost, time to deliver) than I could. Still too far? Pick your field, there'll be experts. You can get even closer to home. After 20 year, I really feel like I'm at least 10x developer across a number of metrics (e.g., value to my employer, amount of complexity I can manage) than I was when I started. Also, some developers do more harm than good. An employer would literally be better paying them not to do work.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness. Sometimes being 10x is only a matter of being free to help the best you can. EDIT: where Carmack shows that he is well above average is not in coding, but in being extremely pragmatic and thous being able to extract good, almost unbiased, information out of every discussion, even the more unpleseant ones. --- Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn't actually be good. "I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good." It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions. People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn't want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that "Steve appreciates vigorous conversation". Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn't appreciate that. The Steve Jobs "hero / sh*head" rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready.
  - msla 5y ago
    > But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness. I honestly don't understand how this is relevant. Carmack is 10x in coding and designing software. Jobs was 10x in PR and persuasion.
fastball 5y ago
Wouldn't winning 99/100 be a 100x chess player?
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Depends on how much the 1x wins, and that depends on who they play, where, when, in what state of mind, with what extra resources…
  - Jensson 5y ago
    They play the same games in the same time. https://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-s-70-board-simul-in-hamburg https://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-s-70-board-simul-in-ha... Here we can see Carlsen being more than 70x as efficient as his opponents. He won 67 of them and lost 1 which is why we can't say that the 70 he faced together was as efficient as him.
johntiger1 5y ago
Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? How about 10 minutes? There _are_ gaps between skill levels, but from personal experience, no one is substantially worse or better. We are after all just flesh and bone...
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  The average marathon run time is about 4.5 hours. The world record marathon run time is 2 hours. Most people who run cannot even complete a marathon. Then there are ultramarathons.
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    > Then there are ultramarathons and then there's Mauro Prosperi
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? That’s the wrong analogy because marathon runners are already the 10x-ers of movement. The average person could cover the distance of a marathon, but it would take them many days of walking and resting. A marathon runner can finish a marathon in around 5 hours. That’s an order of magnitude faster than an average person, so yes, they are 10X-ers. Most people can walk, but few people can cover so much ground so quickly. That’s the essence of the 10X designator. The average programmer is not like the average marathon runner.
  - acdha 5y ago
    I think your comment inadvertently illustrates how much of this comes down to how you define the baseline. I think the comparison for a world-leading marathon runner shouldn't be someone who _never_ exercises but someone who's actually put some effort into fitness (say, an amateur runner) — yes, they're faster but it's nowhere near 10x[1] — just as our baseline for a 10x developer shouldn't be someone who's never written a line of code before but the median professional developer. It's easy to get an order of magnitude win over someone who's completely inept but once you get into more realistic territory you're chasing diminishing returns pretty hard. The other big problem here is that you're talking about a complex skill but trying to reduce it to a single number. Tellingly, most of the 10x developer examples cited are cases where they know exactly what they want to do and have near-complete control over it, which isn't exactly how most developers work. It's really hard to quantify things like teamwork or the ability to distill what people need from what they say they need, and those are core skills for most of us in a way that optimizing a 3D engine is not. 1. I've done marathon length _hikes_ in far less than a single day, and I'm far from a hard-core athlete.
Taylor_OD 5y ago
I guess this all depends on your definition of 10x. It sounds like you are saying 10x the average person rather than 10x the average person who works in that field. I'm a 10x developer if we count non developers. I am not if we could people who work as developers. Likewise there are expert marathon runners who are 10X, or more, than the average human. But there are not marathon runners who run 10x faster than other professional marathon runners.
- lixtra 5y ago
  > But there are not marathon runners who run 10x faster than other professional marathon runners. It’s true that they don’t run 10 times as fast, but the marathon runner that is 1% faster will finish 10x more races before the slower one (YMMV depending on stdev). Similar in software development, picking a 1% better local solution often enough can make the global result 10x better due to the complexity of the systems.
  - Humdeee 5y ago
    This example holds true imo. There is a world of difference between a 2:10 marathoner and a 2:30 marathoner. Same as a 4 min miler and a 4:30 miler, etc. Because of diminishing returns, improvement can still be seen as potentially some kind of multiple in many skillsets.
  - Taylor_OD 5y ago
    So 1x devs exist? I agree.
- deltree7 5y ago
  Claude Shannon, Dennis Ritchie, Vitalik Buterin, Jeff Dean are all 10x programmers. Let's not pretend they dont exist
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Perhaps. But is it meaningful to talk about these incredible outlier cases when considering how you structure an engineering organization? I think there are two kinds of companies that make tech: 1. Companies where all of the technical problems they need to solve can be solved by typical engineers. 2. Companies where some of the technical problems they need to solve are too difficult to be solved by typical engineers. In the latter case you do need "special" engineers and you need to point them at these problems. But what percentage of companies fall into category #2?
dpweb 5y ago
10x is real but I think the more compelling question is how low a bar of competency is allowed to work in the profession - and what is the average level of competency in the programmer market. "Certifications" doesn't get there - too easy to just game a multiple choice test. I would like to see a formal education + testing requirement (ala Doctors, just not 10 years!) Essentially, a barrier of entry for serious programmers. That would ultimately come with a high minimum salary without having to get hired at faang. College accreditation doesn't cut it either. I work w programmers with an MS in CS. Programmers are kinda impressed. Managers could care less. The insanely high demand for labor and (always present) priority to reduce labor costs however encourages the entry of boot-camp you're hired on the low end of experience/competence.
- anchochilis 5y ago
  I love it! Artificially constrain the labor supply with licensing. It would be incredibly lucrative for programmers. As a bonus, it would increase the prestige of our profession. Of course it would be a terrible deal for companies and quite bad for the economy. The fact is that there are many types of applications where a high level of expertise is not needed. Eg. websites for small businesses. The client/end user doesn't care how cleanly architected or efficient or even bug-free the codebase is, and it's a better deal for management to pay some freshly-minted bootcamp grad 50k/yr to hack away than drop 6 times that on a 10xer.
dr-detroit 5y ago
You missed the point that loudmouth braggarts thrive while 10x programmers are toiling in obscurity
pg_1234 5y ago
The reality is you DO have 10x devs, hell you have infinity-x devs, because there are zero value devs - epitomized by the bullshit promoted by stupid start-ups like Swarmia, and next to that, by basic mathematics, anything positive represents a infinity-x improvement.
duckmysick 5y ago
> Marathon runners run 42 km in like two hours but it would take me days to finish the same distance... This doesn't take away the core message of your post. Most marathon races are time limited for logistics reasons - to open streets to traffic. Give or take 6 hours.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> Marathon runners run 42 km in like two hours but it would take me days to finish the same distance... Not really. If you walk at an easy pace of 2 miles per hour, and start at 6am, you'll be done in time for an evening meal. At 3 mph, you might even make afternoon tea. The world record marathon times are, in fact, only about 4-6x what you can do as a walking human being.
- eloisant 5y ago
  Correct - and if you compare world record marathon runners with average (but seasoned) marathon runners, the difference is even smaller.
  - sushisource 5y ago
    Time wise, absolutely true, but as someone who is a reasonably seasoned runner I can say my 3:30 marathon feels lightyears away from 2:00. It doesn't sound 10x harder, it sounds impossibly harder.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      so in the context of TFA, what really needs to be asked is not "are some people massively better coders than others?", but rather "how difficult is it to progress from the equivalent of a 3:30 marathoner to a 2:00, as a coder?" I don't know the answer, TBH. I've been a programmer for nearly 35 years now, and at times along that journey I've been the 10x coder. But I'm not anymore (just like I can't go sub-3h for a marathon at this point), despite knowing a lot more and being better by some metrics than I was during my 10x periods.
      - kthejoker2 5y ago
        Maybe what needs to be asked is "If you're okay with the message getting there in 3 and a half hours instead of 2 hours, do we really need to fetishize 10x performance?" YAGNI is a way stronger principle to base your success on than finding or training unicorns.
noptd 5y ago
Hard agree. For many, I wonder if the denial stems from imposter syndrome and a lack of self-confidence in their own performance at work. I suppose in that scenario, the idea of 10x-ers would be quite uncomfortable if I felt like everyone was referring to my output as the baseline?
hyperpallium2 5y ago
I think the point of x10 devs is this doesn't occur in other fields. It's like a HR Moore's Law. I've always understood it as: if you step back and see the easy way, it's easy to be x10. But most jobs are dominated by actual unavoidable straightforward work. Another exception is mathematics. You can certainly have a x10 mathematician! But it's not a mainstream job.
- jahewson 5y ago
  > this doesn't occur in other fields It absolutely does, just look at surgeons.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    I want to find the 10x surgeon who can complete a one-hour operation in six minutes.
    - skydhash 5y ago
      I don't think the metrics is always speed. I think it is efficiency (quality_of_work.hour).
    - ptman 5y ago
      The best operation is the one not done. Often the operation is unnecessary.
foobiekr 5y ago
10x (or more) engineers in both hardware and SW exist. I've personally known more than a few, they are humbling, and I was pretty good myself at the time. SW is too time consuming, I think, for it to really show, and tools help even things out, but I think math shows that even 100x people exist - the von Neumanns of the world. Maybe they don't exist any more, but we had a bunch of them in the 1900s and it's inarguable that they were at least 1-2 orders of magnitude above the rest. That said, there's a ton of people in the field who now focus on image management so heavily that the numbers of _apparent_ 10x are really skewed. If you're willing to engage in engineering fraud, overselling, etc. you can seem to be one of them pretty easily in most contexts even pushing the most outrageous crap/fraud as something it's not. I feel like ML particularly enables this. I am dealing with two of these guys now, and honestly, it's so tiring dealing with the low-cost-to-produce/high-cost-to-analyze asymmetric warfare that frauds in engineering create.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  What do the two guys produce that's hard to analyze?
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    It's a volumetric warfare. Demonstrating that their output is just a rudimentary assembly of stuff that doesn't do what they claim after the fanfare and announcement emails is much more work than it costs them to produce this stuff.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jjav 5y ago
> It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. But are you a world-class musician yourself? Yeah it would probably take me a week to run a marathon, but I've never run anything so it's not a meaningul comparison. In all your examples you're comparing amateurs or even non-participants vs. the top professionals. Of course there is a huge multiplier, up to sometimes infinity. That's not the typical usage of "10x developer" though. The baseline comparison isn't random person on the street who is not a developer. The comparison is other professional developers who are gainfully employed in the field.
- afpx 5y ago
  I've worked with hundreds of average (professional) developers over the years, and I've only met 1 person who was a 3x developer. I've met several 2x developers and lots of 1.5x developers. I assume a 5x developer exists, but I doubt a 10x does.
  - timando 5y ago
    When your baseline is 0.1x developers, a normal developer can be a 10x developer.
    - afpx 5y ago
      My baseline is the average.
    - jjav 5y ago
      The baseline is 1x, that's what 1x means. i.e. Your regular professional career developer who does good solid work and is always rated "Meets all expectations". That's the 1x.
daniel-cussen 5y ago
> Great chess players beat amateurs at least 99 times out of 100 so must also be 10x in comparison. Absolutely. Chess is very hierarchical. I would say true amateurs will literally never beat a grandmaster, and high school champion-level (not prodigies though) can only beat a grandmaster if the grandmaster plays very weakly (vastly underestimating them, not truly playing their best, or having their guard really, really down).
- jmchuster 5y ago
  In Go, for example, for the professional ranks (1 dan through 9 dan) each rank should win 70% of their games against players from the next rank below.
Olumde 5y ago
10x is often used to suggest that one only seeds a single 10x developer. This makes as much sense as the army being okay with squad made up of one 10x solider. Yes there are 10x solders but their impact is measured by their impact on the unit. IMO this is the only sensible meaning of 10x in large scale software development.
mbrodersen 5y ago
This is so obviously true that I laugh whenever I read the “10x software developers doesn’t exist” articles. Typically written by average developers with an axe to grind.

z3t4 5y ago

The problem is that you can't measure a developer. So you can't say someone is 10x faster or better. If you add a bench-mark like how many LOC is written per day, most will exceed at that benchmark, but the overall quality will go down.

cheschire 5y ago
Schrodinger's project management: developers are measurable as long as they don't know they are being measured.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Better play it safe and commit more often.
  - jgalentine007 5y ago
    I used to 'craft' commits but more frequent WIPs is what the people (who write the checks) want to see.
- Lichtso 5y ago
  You might be joking but it actually has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law Well, your idea is probably closer to the Marilyn Strathern definition.
adolph 5y ago
Cue the link to the story of Bill Atkinson‘s “-2000 Lines of Code”: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
mgkimsal 5y ago
> So you can't say someone is 10x faster or better You can absolutely measure something. I have a colleague going through this right now - he's got... 24 years of experience in software - mostly web - across multiple problem domains/industries. He's now on a web team with someone who's done windows desktop software for 15 years, someone else who graduated from high school 2 years ago and has never worked anywhere before, someone else who has a few years of some web experience but has never actually shipped anything remotely close to what the team is trying to do. There's more, but... the mgt wants to treat everyone as 'equal' and having an 'equal voice'. So... they need some new web service. "Let's use React! Let's use Dart! Let's use foo!" Mgt: "OK - well... let's have a 'shoot out' - everyone research their ideal and we'll present findings!" My colleague: "Hey - here's this. I got this done in a couple days - there's tests, docs, works with the existing infrastructure, and has some sample data for you to play with". Weeks later, others: "Hey, that's not fair, you already knew some of that. I'm not an expert in $foo, but heard good things about it, and people at google use it, so we should too! I just need a few more months to get up to speed, then I can show the rest of you how good it is and why we should use it." Someone being able to accomplish stated goals in a few days, where other people on the team are not even sure what terms to google... Yes, there are people who are "10x developers".
- y4mi 5y ago
  That sounds like a senior engineer vs junior engineer experience level. The term 10x engineer is generally used differently. Though I guess the reason for terms like that might just be related to how many inexperienced people get senior level jobs.
  - mgkimsal 5y ago
    The comment I was replying to was "The problem is that you can't measure a developer." You can measure. One way you measure is years of experience. Another can be time to deliver against a spec. Another can be number/size of defects. Another can be time to remedy defects. Yes, it's "junior vs senior", but their management is explicitly stating "everyone's experience is relevant, and everyone has an equal voice" and so on. No, the person who has literally never contributed to a production codebase should not have an equal say in the technology stack choice. Their voice is not 'equal' to someone who has delivered consistently for 2 decades. And... yes, it's largely bad management. He's looking to move. They had rocky mgt for... a year before, but it was tolerable. Leadership changed and my colleague stuck around the last few months to see if things would get better, but they're getting worse.
namdnay 5y ago
You can't "measure" a session musician either. And yet some of them take hundreds of dollars an hour to be there for a recording, so clearly there is a way to know
- RHSman2 5y ago
  If a session musician charges by the hour you know they aren’t good OR haven’t been recognized yet. Day rates.
  - namdnay 5y ago
    When a wise man points at the moon, an idiot looks at his finger
- z3t4 5y ago
  We are exposed to music so much that even someone who don't know how to play an instrument can tell the difference. So the average Joe can tell the difference in for example talent shows. Now imagine a talent show with programmers/developers, we kinda have that already with hackatons, but then it becomes more about the presentation, the actual code - if any code exist at all - is an absolute "hack".
KptMarchewa 5y ago
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
trashtester 5y ago
Sometimes you can. At some point I worked as a consultant assisting a team that actually picked the next item from the backlog as their next task. All tasks were estimated before they were put in the backlog and assigned to someone. I would usually finish tasks in less than 30% of the esimated time, while some would use 3x+ the estimated time, and then only because they were receiving assistance a couple of hours per week. The guy doing the estimages was evaluated based on his ability to estimate accurately, so he had to inflate the estimates beyond what would be reasonable. This was in a country with really good job protection laws....

temp8964 5y ago

"myth" is just another ruined word.

smoldesu 5y ago

The only reason DOOM was finished in 1997 was because John Carmack recognized himself as the 10x developer and started living in-office until the game was finished. Obviously it's important to not let silly titles distract you, but stepping up to the plate like this is how organizations get stuff done.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
And while there’s nothing wrong with people choosing to do that, there’s absolutely everything wrong with organisations that expect it.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Yes! This is how bad organisations get stuff done. Good organisations don't run into these problems in the first place because they listen to their staff and don't set arbitrary deadlines* * I have no idea how arbitrary the deadline for Doom was. But I've seen so many devs burn themselves out meeting deadlines that were pulled out of a hat by managers because it gave them the illusion of control
- trashtester 5y ago
  Most real 10x's work precisely when they decide to. If they are mistreated by their employer, other stand in line to hire them. The crunch problem mostly applies to the average-and-below developers (possibly with the exception of some devs that give up leverage vs their employer somehow, by depending on them for a visa, only consider work in a given industry, etc)

latch 5y ago

I totally agree, but I think you can use examples closer to home. Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics (quality, cost, time to deliver) than I could. Still too far? Pick your field, there'll be experts. You can get even closer to home. After 20 year, I really feel like I'm at least 10x developer across a number of metrics (e.g., value to my employer, amount of complexity I can manage) than I was when I started. Also, some developers do more harm than good. An employer would literally be better paying them not to do work.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness. Sometimes being 10x is only a matter of being free to help the best you can. EDIT: where Carmack shows that he is well above average is not in coding, but in being extremely pragmatic and thous being able to extract good, almost unbiased, information out of every discussion, even the more unpleseant ones. --- Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn't actually be good. "I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good." It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions. People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn't want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that "Steve appreciates vigorous conversation". Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn't appreciate that. The Steve Jobs "hero / sh*head" rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready.
- msla 5y ago
  > But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness. I honestly don't understand how this is relevant. Carmack is 10x in coding and designing software. Jobs was 10x in PR and persuasion.

fastball 5y ago

Wouldn't winning 99/100 be a 100x chess player?

eurasiantiger 5y ago
Depends on how much the 1x wins, and that depends on who they play, where, when, in what state of mind, with what extra resources…
- Jensson 5y ago
  They play the same games in the same time. https://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-s-70-board-simul-in-hamburg https://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-s-70-board-simul-in-ha... Here we can see Carlsen being more than 70x as efficient as his opponents. He won 67 of them and lost 1 which is why we can't say that the 70 he faced together was as efficient as him.

johntiger1 5y ago

Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? How about 10 minutes? There _are_ gaps between skill levels, but from personal experience, no one is substantially worse or better. We are after all just flesh and bone...

Consultant32452 5y ago
The average marathon run time is about 4.5 hours. The world record marathon run time is 2 hours. Most people who run cannot even complete a marathon. Then there are ultramarathons.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > Then there are ultramarathons and then there's Mauro Prosperi
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? That’s the wrong analogy because marathon runners are already the 10x-ers of movement. The average person could cover the distance of a marathon, but it would take them many days of walking and resting. A marathon runner can finish a marathon in around 5 hours. That’s an order of magnitude faster than an average person, so yes, they are 10X-ers. Most people can walk, but few people can cover so much ground so quickly. That’s the essence of the 10X designator. The average programmer is not like the average marathon runner.
- acdha 5y ago
  I think your comment inadvertently illustrates how much of this comes down to how you define the baseline. I think the comparison for a world-leading marathon runner shouldn't be someone who _never_ exercises but someone who's actually put some effort into fitness (say, an amateur runner) — yes, they're faster but it's nowhere near 10x[1] — just as our baseline for a 10x developer shouldn't be someone who's never written a line of code before but the median professional developer. It's easy to get an order of magnitude win over someone who's completely inept but once you get into more realistic territory you're chasing diminishing returns pretty hard. The other big problem here is that you're talking about a complex skill but trying to reduce it to a single number. Tellingly, most of the 10x developer examples cited are cases where they know exactly what they want to do and have near-complete control over it, which isn't exactly how most developers work. It's really hard to quantify things like teamwork or the ability to distill what people need from what they say they need, and those are core skills for most of us in a way that optimizing a 3D engine is not. 1. I've done marathon length _hikes_ in far less than a single day, and I'm far from a hard-core athlete.

Taylor_OD 5y ago

I guess this all depends on your definition of 10x. It sounds like you are saying 10x the average person rather than 10x the average person who works in that field. I'm a 10x developer if we count non developers. I am not if we could people who work as developers. Likewise there are expert marathon runners who are 10X, or more, than the average human. But there are not marathon runners who run 10x faster than other professional marathon runners.

lixtra 5y ago
> But there are not marathon runners who run 10x faster than other professional marathon runners. It’s true that they don’t run 10 times as fast, but the marathon runner that is 1% faster will finish 10x more races before the slower one (YMMV depending on stdev). Similar in software development, picking a 1% better local solution often enough can make the global result 10x better due to the complexity of the systems.
- Humdeee 5y ago
  This example holds true imo. There is a world of difference between a 2:10 marathoner and a 2:30 marathoner. Same as a 4 min miler and a 4:30 miler, etc. Because of diminishing returns, improvement can still be seen as potentially some kind of multiple in many skillsets.
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  So 1x devs exist? I agree.
deltree7 5y ago
Claude Shannon, Dennis Ritchie, Vitalik Buterin, Jeff Dean are all 10x programmers. Let's not pretend they dont exist
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Perhaps. But is it meaningful to talk about these incredible outlier cases when considering how you structure an engineering organization? I think there are two kinds of companies that make tech: 1. Companies where all of the technical problems they need to solve can be solved by typical engineers. 2. Companies where some of the technical problems they need to solve are too difficult to be solved by typical engineers. In the latter case you do need "special" engineers and you need to point them at these problems. But what percentage of companies fall into category #2?

dpweb 5y ago

10x is real but I think the more compelling question is how low a bar of competency is allowed to work in the profession - and what is the average level of competency in the programmer market. "Certifications" doesn't get there - too easy to just game a multiple choice test. I would like to see a formal education + testing requirement (ala Doctors, just not 10 years!) Essentially, a barrier of entry for serious programmers. That would ultimately come with a high minimum salary without having to get hired at faang. College accreditation doesn't cut it either. I work w programmers with an MS in CS. Programmers are kinda impressed. Managers could care less. The insanely high demand for labor and (always present) priority to reduce labor costs however encourages the entry of boot-camp you're hired on the low end of experience/competence.

anchochilis 5y ago
I love it! Artificially constrain the labor supply with licensing. It would be incredibly lucrative for programmers. As a bonus, it would increase the prestige of our profession. Of course it would be a terrible deal for companies and quite bad for the economy. The fact is that there are many types of applications where a high level of expertise is not needed. Eg. websites for small businesses. The client/end user doesn't care how cleanly architected or efficient or even bug-free the codebase is, and it's a better deal for management to pay some freshly-minted bootcamp grad 50k/yr to hack away than drop 6 times that on a 10xer.

dr-detroit 5y ago

You missed the point that loudmouth braggarts thrive while 10x programmers are toiling in obscurity

pg_1234 5y ago

The reality is you DO have 10x devs, hell you have infinity-x devs, because there are zero value devs - epitomized by the bullshit promoted by stupid start-ups like Swarmia, and next to that, by basic mathematics, anything positive represents a infinity-x improvement.

duckmysick 5y ago

> Marathon runners run 42 km in like two hours but it would take me days to finish the same distance... This doesn't take away the core message of your post. Most marathon races are time limited for logistics reasons - to open streets to traffic. Give or take 6 hours.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> Marathon runners run 42 km in like two hours but it would take me days to finish the same distance... Not really. If you walk at an easy pace of 2 miles per hour, and start at 6am, you'll be done in time for an evening meal. At 3 mph, you might even make afternoon tea. The world record marathon times are, in fact, only about 4-6x what you can do as a walking human being.

eloisant 5y ago
Correct - and if you compare world record marathon runners with average (but seasoned) marathon runners, the difference is even smaller.
- sushisource 5y ago
  Time wise, absolutely true, but as someone who is a reasonably seasoned runner I can say my 3:30 marathon feels lightyears away from 2:00. It doesn't sound 10x harder, it sounds impossibly harder.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    so in the context of TFA, what really needs to be asked is not "are some people massively better coders than others?", but rather "how difficult is it to progress from the equivalent of a 3:30 marathoner to a 2:00, as a coder?" I don't know the answer, TBH. I've been a programmer for nearly 35 years now, and at times along that journey I've been the 10x coder. But I'm not anymore (just like I can't go sub-3h for a marathon at this point), despite knowing a lot more and being better by some metrics than I was during my 10x periods.
    - kthejoker2 5y ago
      Maybe what needs to be asked is "If you're okay with the message getting there in 3 and a half hours instead of 2 hours, do we really need to fetishize 10x performance?" YAGNI is a way stronger principle to base your success on than finding or training unicorns.

noptd 5y ago

Hard agree. For many, I wonder if the denial stems from imposter syndrome and a lack of self-confidence in their own performance at work. I suppose in that scenario, the idea of 10x-ers would be quite uncomfortable if I felt like everyone was referring to my output as the baseline?

hyperpallium2 5y ago

I think the point of x10 devs is this doesn't occur in other fields. It's like a HR Moore's Law. I've always understood it as: if you step back and see the easy way, it's easy to be x10. But most jobs are dominated by actual unavoidable straightforward work. Another exception is mathematics. You can certainly have a x10 mathematician! But it's not a mainstream job.

jahewson 5y ago
> this doesn't occur in other fields It absolutely does, just look at surgeons.
- philwelch 5y ago
  I want to find the 10x surgeon who can complete a one-hour operation in six minutes.
  - skydhash 5y ago
    I don't think the metrics is always speed. I think it is efficiency (quality_of_work.hour).
  - ptman 5y ago
    The best operation is the one not done. Often the operation is unnecessary.

foobiekr 5y ago

10x (or more) engineers in both hardware and SW exist. I've personally known more than a few, they are humbling, and I was pretty good myself at the time. SW is too time consuming, I think, for it to really show, and tools help even things out, but I think math shows that even 100x people exist - the von Neumanns of the world. Maybe they don't exist any more, but we had a bunch of them in the 1900s and it's inarguable that they were at least 1-2 orders of magnitude above the rest. That said, there's a ton of people in the field who now focus on image management so heavily that the numbers of _apparent_ 10x are really skewed. If you're willing to engage in engineering fraud, overselling, etc. you can seem to be one of them pretty easily in most contexts even pushing the most outrageous crap/fraud as something it's not. I feel like ML particularly enables this. I am dealing with two of these guys now, and honestly, it's so tiring dealing with the low-cost-to-produce/high-cost-to-analyze asymmetric warfare that frauds in engineering create.

cutemonster 5y ago
What do the two guys produce that's hard to analyze?
- foobiekr 5y ago
  It's a volumetric warfare. Demonstrating that their output is just a rudimentary assembly of stuff that doesn't do what they claim after the fanfare and announcement emails is much more work than it costs them to produce this stuff.

deleted 5y ago

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jjav 5y ago

> It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. But are you a world-class musician yourself? Yeah it would probably take me a week to run a marathon, but I've never run anything so it's not a meaningul comparison. In all your examples you're comparing amateurs or even non-participants vs. the top professionals. Of course there is a huge multiplier, up to sometimes infinity. That's not the typical usage of "10x developer" though. The baseline comparison isn't random person on the street who is not a developer. The comparison is other professional developers who are gainfully employed in the field.

afpx 5y ago
I've worked with hundreds of average (professional) developers over the years, and I've only met 1 person who was a 3x developer. I've met several 2x developers and lots of 1.5x developers. I assume a 5x developer exists, but I doubt a 10x does.
- timando 5y ago
  When your baseline is 0.1x developers, a normal developer can be a 10x developer.
  - afpx 5y ago
    My baseline is the average.
  - jjav 5y ago
    The baseline is 1x, that's what 1x means. i.e. Your regular professional career developer who does good solid work and is always rated "Meets all expectations". That's the 1x.

daniel-cussen 5y ago

> Great chess players beat amateurs at least 99 times out of 100 so must also be 10x in comparison. Absolutely. Chess is very hierarchical. I would say true amateurs will literally never beat a grandmaster, and high school champion-level (not prodigies though) can only beat a grandmaster if the grandmaster plays very weakly (vastly underestimating them, not truly playing their best, or having their guard really, really down).

jmchuster 5y ago
In Go, for example, for the professional ranks (1 dan through 9 dan) each rank should win 70% of their games against players from the next rank below.

Olumde 5y ago

10x is often used to suggest that one only seeds a single 10x developer. This makes as much sense as the army being okay with squad made up of one 10x solider. Yes there are 10x solders but their impact is measured by their impact on the unit. IMO this is the only sensible meaning of 10x in large scale software development.

mbrodersen 5y ago

This is so obviously true that I laugh whenever I read the “10x software developers doesn’t exist” articles. Typically written by average developers with an axe to grind.