> You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time Exactly. There are many modes of that, and

> You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time Exactly. There are many modes of that, and you named a few examples. Another example, company has 2 systems maintained by 10 people each. Someone comes in and figures out how to generalize one of the systems to both cases, so they free up 10 of those programmers to go do something else. Or - 10 people are beating their head on a problem for months, someone comes along and says "it might be OK if we don't solve that problem, let's move on" Or - someone figures out that a system/module doesn't need to be written because an out-of-the-box solution exists. Like, I am not a 10X programmer in the sense that I can write 10X the code of the next guy. But have I prevented 10-people's-worth of wasted effort in my career? Yeah...