> The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can prod

> The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly. The only thing about the 10x programmer saying that's a myth, is the assumption that it's a quality inherent to the person. You can absolutely accomplish the same level of impact in a week that might take a competent respectable colleague a year, and you don't have to be a genius to do it. You just have to have a good idea at the right moment. It doesn't even have to be a constant thing. In my career, sometimes I'm just a normal programmer and sometimes I do some bona fide 10x work. A lot the times the 10x work I get the most kudos for will be some absurdly simple low-effort yet impactful thing, like sending pull requests to projects that change a single line of code to bump up a version number in an xml file that has 0days. But because the idea is so simple and almost silly, I can do it a few hundred times and have more impact. Then I can take into consideration that many of these projects I'm fixing are libraries or frameworks, so I'm not only rescuing the project but rescuing their users too. That kind of transitive impact is what makes 10x possible. Programming isn't like a 19th century assembly line where labor had a very static measurable and manageable impact. Our culture is still catching up in fully understanding and internalizing the enabling impact that computers make possible.