18 ms·

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

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
    Waiting for the equivalent of Carmack to write and open source the underlying libraries, basically.
- knorker 5y ago
  Almost certainly you would just plain have not been able to do it at all. Not in 1993-1996. Not without it already having been done once. And if you had, it would have taken you more than 10 years to realize what the right thing is, and to solve all very complex problems that showed up on the way. Quake doesn't even have any load times! Not even with the hardware available at the time.
randomsearch 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'm not a games programmer. I doubt a median games programmer would take 10x the length of time that it would take any other games programmer. It just seems implausible, and I don't know why people want to defend it.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  > I doubt a median games programmer would take 10x the length of time that it would take any other games programmer. It just seems implausible, and I don't know why people want to defend it. Then why did all those thousands of other game programmers fail at creating a decent 3d game, before Doom was released? It's not like Carmack was the only one trying.
- munificent 5y ago
  I spent 8 years at EA and was a senior software engineer. I have absolutely witnessed 10x game programmers. I think in any field where you have a deep domain with complex, difficult constraints, it is entirely possible to have programmers with 10x the effectiveness of the median simply because of their greater domain expertise. They know the unique algorithms, data structures, design patterns, hacks, tricks, hardware quirks, tools, debuggers, code smells, etc. All of that has a huge compounding factor when it comes to output. Here's a story I like to tell: I joined EA shortly after the PS2 came out and worked at the studio that made Madden. Madden was a launch title on the PS2 (meaning it shipped right as the PS2 hardware did) and that version essentially sealed Madden's success. It was hugely successful. But making a launch title is really hard. You're developing softare for a hardware platform that is itself in flux. When EA first started working on Madden PS2, they didn't have any dev kits to work on. I don't know if dev kits even existed. They needed to write code that they couldn't compile and run. But if they didn't start immediately, they would never be able to get the game done in time for the launch. They had a guy on the team with a reputation for being a wizard. He took the MIPS R5900 reference manual, and disappeared into an office with blacked out windows for some number of weeks. When he re-emerged, he had written a PS2 emulator despite never having access to an actual PS2. The rest of the team were able to compile and run the game on that emulator so that they could make progress until eventually real dev kits arrived. From what I heard, when the real hardware showed up, the game actually ran on it. Now, some of this legend may have grown in the retelling (it was already legendary by the time it was told to me), but I worked with that engineer a few times and I can vouch for his incredible ability to get stuff done. I remember once when FIFA was having performance problems and couldn't get their framerate high enough to ship. He was called into to help and a few days later, got it up to a solid 30 FPS. This was even though the team's own engineers had been trying to make progress and he had never touched the code before. I think people dislike the mythos of 10x engineers because it's interpreted as some sort of cognitive essentialism. But I think most of it is just really deep domain expertise. Instead of talking about "10x engineers", we should talk about 10x at what.

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
  Waiting for the equivalent of Carmack to write and open source the underlying libraries, basically.
knorker 5y ago
Almost certainly you would just plain have not been able to do it at all. Not in 1993-1996. Not without it already having been done once. And if you had, it would have taken you more than 10 years to realize what the right thing is, and to solve all very complex problems that showed up on the way. Quake doesn't even have any load times! Not even with the hardware available at the time.

randomsearch 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'm not a games programmer. I doubt a median games programmer would take 10x the length of time that it would take any other games programmer. It just seems implausible, and I don't know why people want to defend it.

baobabKoodaa 5y ago
> I doubt a median games programmer would take 10x the length of time that it would take any other games programmer. It just seems implausible, and I don't know why people want to defend it. Then why did all those thousands of other game programmers fail at creating a decent 3d game, before Doom was released? It's not like Carmack was the only one trying.
munificent 5y ago
I spent 8 years at EA and was a senior software engineer. I have absolutely witnessed 10x game programmers. I think in any field where you have a deep domain with complex, difficult constraints, it is entirely possible to have programmers with 10x the effectiveness of the median simply because of their greater domain expertise. They know the unique algorithms, data structures, design patterns, hacks, tricks, hardware quirks, tools, debuggers, code smells, etc. All of that has a huge compounding factor when it comes to output. Here's a story I like to tell: I joined EA shortly after the PS2 came out and worked at the studio that made Madden. Madden was a launch title on the PS2 (meaning it shipped right as the PS2 hardware did) and that version essentially sealed Madden's success. It was hugely successful. But making a launch title is really hard. You're developing softare for a hardware platform that is itself in flux. When EA first started working on Madden PS2, they didn't have any dev kits to work on. I don't know if dev kits even existed. They needed to write code that they couldn't compile and run. But if they didn't start immediately, they would never be able to get the game done in time for the launch. They had a guy on the team with a reputation for being a wizard. He took the MIPS R5900 reference manual, and disappeared into an office with blacked out windows for some number of weeks. When he re-emerged, he had written a PS2 emulator despite never having access to an actual PS2. The rest of the team were able to compile and run the game on that emulator so that they could make progress until eventually real dev kits arrived. From what I heard, when the real hardware showed up, the game actually ran on it. Now, some of this legend may have grown in the retelling (it was already legendary by the time it was told to me), but I worked with that engineer a few times and I can vouch for his incredible ability to get stuff done. I remember once when FIFA was having performance problems and couldn't get their framerate high enough to ship. He was called into to help and a few days later, got it up to a solid 30 FPS. This was even though the team's own engineers had been trying to make progress and he had never touched the code before. I think people dislike the mythos of 10x engineers because it's interpreted as some sort of cognitive essentialism. But I think most of it is just really deep domain expertise. Instead of talking about "10x engineers", we should talk about 10x at what.