4 ms·

To pose it another way: for general software Dev (not some niche use case that only one guy understands), let’s say building websites in Vue or React, the idea

To pose it another way: for general software Dev (not some niche use case that only one guy understands), let’s say building websites in Vue or React, the idea of a 10x developer is that they can work in January and another, average, programmer can then spend February, March, April, May, June, July, August, and Sept… and the average guy won’t get more done? Or they come in only every other Monday and contribute as much as a median Dev working full time? It just doesn’t seem reasonable at all, at least if we read it literally. I have worked with and met great, outstanding, developers who are much better than me. Some of them famous. None of them are anything close to 10x as productive, and I’m not particularly great. They’re much smarter than me, for sure, but they’re not 10x as productive.

e1g 5y ago
There is no "10X" touch-typist because a) the performance limit is absolute & relatively low and b) the learning curve is such that it's easy to get to the limit and plateau. Now let's increase complexity - still typing, but you must translate the text from another language. Increase again - now you're translating poetry. Increase again - the poetry is original Shakespeare. You need to translate into contemporary English approachable to Gen Z, as a script for a TikTok short, referencing memes from current events. There is no doubt that some people will have a combination of talents - in language, typing, copywriting, built-up cultural knowledge, lived experiences - that will make them 10X in such jobs. The more software development work approaches touch-typing, the less difference between 1x and 10X — strict Jira tickets in, garbage out, maybe slightly faster. Spec-work, and most grunt-work, is undifferentiated and does not benefit from a 10X person. The more your work approaches poetry - such as exercising user empathy, improving the architecture, considering UX, respecting performance constraints, understanding user's jobs to be done, and improving your implementation around that - the more creative space there is for 10X to reveal itself.
- thrower123 5y ago
  Even with drudge ticket-punching work, there is a vast spectrum of productivity between somebody who is capable and conscientious enough to do it correctly the first time and the person who has to rework everything multiple times because they can't do it right the first time and continue making mistakes.
- dexen 5y ago
  >There is no "10X" touch-typist Ironically enough your example is flawed: there are documented 10x touch-typists. The realities of the court system place high demands on the typists; the minimum required typing speed is already quite high: trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively[1] - and some exceed the minimum and go for 300 wpm. Even better, the official record for American English [is] 375 wpm [2]. Compare that to the average typing speeds around 30 - 40 wpm [3] Granted, the court reporters use specialized input devices (stenotypes) - but hey, the same can be said about highly productive programmers, who use specialized development environments - and sometimes also specialized input devices. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype [2] ibid. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing#Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing#Speed
  - e1g 5y ago
    You make a good point that hints at another often-undefined assumption in these discussions - 10X performance vs who, exactly? IMO, it should be vs "a typical peer in that profession". For court reporters, if "a typical peer" is a trained court reporter who averages ~200 wpm, and a superstar is at 300wpm, then it's a 1.5X gain. If a "typical peer" is a regular Joe, then 300wpm would be 10X - but this doesn't feel appropriate because we compare productivity of a "10x developer" vs a "typical developer", rather than vs "an average Facebook visitor".
    - dexen 5y ago
      Fair enough. I've had good luck discussing the subject back in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464807 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6465175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6465175, with the insightful replies. Wow, reading the discussion from back then shows how much HN changed in spirit.
knorker 5y ago
How long would it have taken you or me to write Doom, or Quake? How long would it have taken Carmack, if it'd just been him? I think you have a false dichotomy here. Carmack isn't 10x better a C or assembly than me. But in his domain he's easily 10x smarter and more productive than me. And on top of that, he has a quarter century more experience in graphics programming than me. That shit accumulates. Yes, actually. In graphics programming, from 2D and software rendered, to OpenGL and VR, you could give him and me (and presumably you) any task achievable in a few human decades, and he'd do it more than 10x faster. "Graphics programming" is not a small niche, and yes in that space he's a 10x programmer. I think you're thinking of this the wrong way. I agree that for something as simple as "build some websites", yeah, 10x is going to be very hard. You're then just turning specs into code, pretty much. 10x programmers are those that don't waste 9 months. The hard part is knowing which 9 months out of 10, which 9 ideas and components out of 10, is waste. For "build a web forum" or something, yeah there are no 10x programmers. Though there are many many 0.1x programmers still.
- davemp 5y ago
  > How long would it have taken you or me to write Doom, or Quake? Almost definitely not 10 years.
  - datameta 5y ago
    I think it's more likely that we wouldn't have thought something like Doom to be possible until Carmack came along and squeezed oodles of math tricks and hacks into the game to let it run on hardware of the era. So it may as well have be an infinitely long development time for us.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    If you wanted to write Doom, starting in 1993, and take 10 years, your most efficient strategy would probably be to do something else for the first nine of them and wait for the technology to change around you.
    - jimbokun 5y ago
ahupp 5y ago
That definition is too narrow. How about this one: can someone work for 1 year and (consistently) produce 10x more value for their organization than the median engineer? This seems transparently true if you've worked in any large organization.
pjc50 5y ago
> some niche use case that only one guy understands But that's where all the value is! Step 1 of being an exceptional worker is not to do unexceptional work if you can at all avoid it. > at least if we read it literally This is where it does fall down. There isn't an X that you can reliably measure 10 of, it's all very subjective.

e1g 5y ago

There is no "10X" touch-typist because a) the performance limit is absolute & relatively low and b) the learning curve is such that it's easy to get to the limit and plateau. Now let's increase complexity - still typing, but you must translate the text from another language. Increase again - now you're translating poetry. Increase again - the poetry is original Shakespeare. You need to translate into contemporary English approachable to Gen Z, as a script for a TikTok short, referencing memes from current events. There is no doubt that some people will have a combination of talents - in language, typing, copywriting, built-up cultural knowledge, lived experiences - that will make them 10X in such jobs. The more software development work approaches touch-typing, the less difference between 1x and 10X — strict Jira tickets in, garbage out, maybe slightly faster. Spec-work, and most grunt-work, is undifferentiated and does not benefit from a 10X person. The more your work approaches poetry - such as exercising user empathy, improving the architecture, considering UX, respecting performance constraints, understanding user's jobs to be done, and improving your implementation around that - the more creative space there is for 10X to reveal itself.

thrower123 5y ago
Even with drudge ticket-punching work, there is a vast spectrum of productivity between somebody who is capable and conscientious enough to do it correctly the first time and the person who has to rework everything multiple times because they can't do it right the first time and continue making mistakes.
dexen 5y ago
>There is no "10X" touch-typist Ironically enough your example is flawed: there are documented 10x touch-typists. The realities of the court system place high demands on the typists; the minimum required typing speed is already quite high: trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively[1] - and some exceed the minimum and go for 300 wpm. Even better, the official record for American English [is] 375 wpm [2]. Compare that to the average typing speeds around 30 - 40 wpm [3] Granted, the court reporters use specialized input devices (stenotypes) - but hey, the same can be said about highly productive programmers, who use specialized development environments - and sometimes also specialized input devices. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype [2] ibid. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing#Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing#Speed
- e1g 5y ago
  You make a good point that hints at another often-undefined assumption in these discussions - 10X performance vs who, exactly? IMO, it should be vs "a typical peer in that profession". For court reporters, if "a typical peer" is a trained court reporter who averages ~200 wpm, and a superstar is at 300wpm, then it's a 1.5X gain. If a "typical peer" is a regular Joe, then 300wpm would be 10X - but this doesn't feel appropriate because we compare productivity of a "10x developer" vs a "typical developer", rather than vs "an average Facebook visitor".
  - dexen 5y ago
    Fair enough. I've had good luck discussing the subject back in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464807 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6465175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6465175, with the insightful replies. Wow, reading the discussion from back then shows how much HN changed in spirit.

knorker 5y ago

How long would it have taken you or me to write Doom, or Quake? How long would it have taken Carmack, if it'd just been him? I think you have a false dichotomy here. Carmack isn't 10x better a C or assembly than me. But in his domain he's easily 10x smarter and more productive than me. And on top of that, he has a quarter century more experience in graphics programming than me. That shit accumulates. Yes, actually. In graphics programming, from 2D and software rendered, to OpenGL and VR, you could give him and me (and presumably you) any task achievable in a few human decades, and he'd do it more than 10x faster. "Graphics programming" is not a small niche, and yes in that space he's a 10x programmer. I think you're thinking of this the wrong way. I agree that for something as simple as "build some websites", yeah, 10x is going to be very hard. You're then just turning specs into code, pretty much. 10x programmers are those that don't waste 9 months. The hard part is knowing which 9 months out of 10, which 9 ideas and components out of 10, is waste. For "build a web forum" or something, yeah there are no 10x programmers. Though there are many many 0.1x programmers still.

davemp 5y ago
> How long would it have taken you or me to write Doom, or Quake? Almost definitely not 10 years.
- datameta 5y ago
  I think it's more likely that we wouldn't have thought something like Doom to be possible until Carmack came along and squeezed oodles of math tricks and hacks into the game to let it run on hardware of the era. So it may as well have be an infinitely long development time for us.
- pjc50 5y ago
  If you wanted to write Doom, starting in 1993, and take 10 years, your most efficient strategy would probably be to do something else for the first nine of them and wait for the technology to change around you.
  - jimbokun 5y ago

ahupp 5y ago

That definition is too narrow. How about this one: can someone work for 1 year and (consistently) produce 10x more value for their organization than the median engineer? This seems transparently true if you've worked in any large organization.

pjc50 5y ago

> some niche use case that only one guy understands But that's where all the value is! Step 1 of being an exceptional worker is not to do unexceptional work if you can at all avoid it. > at least if we read it literally This is where it does fall down. There isn't an X that you can reliably measure 10 of, it's all very subjective.