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A 10x or 1x developer is not really something to focus on. It's the 0.1x developer that is the most important one. I've been a 10x, 1x and 0.1x developer. Let

A 10x or 1x developer is not really something to focus on. It's the 0.1x developer that is the most important one. I've been a 10x, 1x and 0.1x developer. Let me tell you: most business or managers have a hard time distinguishing between all of them. - 10x: You're smart, knowledgeable and passionate. You love going to the office and create code. Love the team and are moving forward every day. You're doing meaningful work. Managers love your work. You get excellent reviews. You earn as much as your colleagues. - 1x: You do your job to get money. There's a lot of business shit, stupid decisions all around you. Dispite that, you try your best to do your job. You sometimes complain to managers, they claim they can't do much. You get good reviews. You earn as much as your colleagues. - 0.1x: You spend your days wasting time on the internet (Hi there, welcome to HN! :D). Some days you do nothing, some days you spend 15 minutes fixing a bug. You find excuses of things you are stuck at. Managers give you good reviews. You start questioning when you get good reviews, what the fuck your other colleagues are doing? Are they also goofing off all the time? Probably. You earn as much as your colleagues.

denimnerd42 4y ago
how about the negative 1x or negative 10x developers. you soak up tons of time of other developers' mentoring time while never "learning how to fish". you can't figure out how to solve problems so you're always stuck. you choose the wrong path of investigation and waste weeks on the wrong line. you won't post your code for review until it's "ready" so no one's ever sure really how to help you or your progress. people complain about you to managers but nothing is done. you get good reviews. you earn as much as your colleagues.
- koonsolo 4y ago
  That definitely exists too. But I guess they already have some chance of getting fired.
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    I actually think they get promoted for shipping something exceedingly complex and challenging that still barely works. It doesn't matter if a much simpler, robust solution was passed over.
  - hnfong 4y ago
    There are costs to firing people (morale, hiring overhead, other risks etc) so often they are kept around for a couple years on the hope that they will somehow improve. 0.1 devs are actually fine, they don’t really exist unless they stare at YouTube for 36 hours each week. Usually when incompetent devs start to do something the result turns negative quite quickly.
- tester756 4y ago
  guesses problems reasons instead of try to debug I worked with person who told his/her manager that "they [mozilla] decreased stack size in firefox[0] and that's why app doesn't work because there was a lot of recursive calls under the hood cuz they used knockout.js or something like that" the actual reason was some null or some other trivial thing [0] I checked that later and they even increased it in last versions.
- shagie 4y ago
  That's the Net Negative Producing Programmer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf
- pnutjam 4y ago
  Or, you build complex structures to perform automation, but never finish them. You spend alot of time and energy maintaining the house of cards and finishing the non-automated parts without letting others know what you're doing. You move on and the house of cards all falls down. <Been in the cleanup phase of this multiple times>
- zigzag312 4y ago
  or you rewrite something that worked fine, with buggy half-backed implementation that uses some new overhyped library/language :)
zamadatix 4y ago
The 1x and 10x can much easier change into a high paying job at another company that doesn't pay all of its developers the same. The problem with that is a lot more people think they are 10x and others 0.1x when in reality most are ~1x so that leads to a lot of surprise about how even the pay is though.
- koonsolo 4y ago
  I only have experience in EU, and here I think a 10x might be able to get max 20% more. In practice, they might love the job more than the pay, and so make as much as the rest. The ones earning more money are the ones who negotiate. Edit: Sorry my explanation wasn't complete. In my opinion, getting a 10x developer has more to do with the work environment than with the developer. Some companies or structures just don't allow you to be a 10x developer.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    > in EU, and here I think a 10x might be able to get max 20% more. More like 200% more. There's a lot of Europeans here in the Valley, but almost no Americans in Europe. There's a reason for that. There are also "dark matter devs" in Europe that are working remotely for SV companies, at SV salaries. They simply won't ever show up for interviews at local companies. > In my opinion, getting a 10x developer has more to do with the work environment than with the developer. I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Next summer they tried to get him back but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. Of course, he wouldn't return. That's when they realized a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to them; they lucked out hiring him that summer but there was no chance they could attract someone like him full time.
usrn 4y ago
This was the post I needed to read today. Thanks.
random3 4y ago
Hahhaah - I was about to post a similar comment. I think there's a default engineer level and then 0.1 or the -10x :) The -10x will create complexity that cannot be undone. This said an engineer is just an engineer. The problem is many coders are not engineers.
- thow34wqway 4y ago
  10x is real. Those programmers are still alive. Example Jeff Dean.
  - random3 4y ago
    Also John Carmak and ton that are not well known. The point is it's a relative measure that is overused. Is Jeff Dean 10x relative to John Carmak? :) Irrelavant? Yes. Is the 0.1x and -10x more relevant? perhaps :)
ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
Key callout: "You earn as much as your colleagues." Theres no reward for being 10x at 99% of companies. If youre that good, start your own company.
- turnsout 4y ago
  I think "10X" is a goofy concept, but I have absolutely worked with developers who have dramatically more impact than their coworkers. To a person, none of them wanted to start their own company. In my experience, they want to come to work, write great code, go home at 5pm and collect a paycheck. With that said, there are plenty of entrepreneurs and technical co-founders who think they're 10X developers. That's how you end up with large legacy Ruby codebases (I kid, I kid)
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
    Yeah youre correct, I'm talking money wise, you dont get paid 10x your colleagues, maybe 1.5x.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
Dunno, I feel the 0.1x-thing is often a function of obstacles in the way of productivity. At my last job, I was part of a crack team of senior consultants spent months building a CRUD service that basically did nothing but passing data from incoming requests to another API, and then doing the same with the responses. Because the service was distributed, this was asynchronous, and state was persisted in a byzantine state machine. By God were all the buzzword dev-ops checkmarks green. The entire team spent most days navigating a maze of elaborate OpenAPI specs, trying to make sense of nebulous kubernetes failure states, and debugging spontaneously self-breaking Jenkins pipelines that took a full hour to run each time regardless of fail or success. Hours were spent documenting the work, multiple daily standups, updating Jiras with elaborate definitions of done, time reporting in multiple tracking systems. It could take a full week of this stuff to bring a trivial code change into production. That was at most 0.1x development. I spent a lot of time browsing the internet because I literally couldn't affect the speed of the work, I was always waiting for some process somewhere to decide to finish so I could repeat the cycle. Note: Many of these things are necessary sometimes in larger projects. This was not a large project, but it was run as though it was, leading to a development workload that was almost entirely process overhead. In my spare time, I developed an internet search engine, and quite literally was 100x more productive than I was in my dayjob because I had none of that bullshit in the way.
gsibble 4y ago
I can be all 3 of those things at the same job. Just depends upon how I'm feeling that day.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Often, at initial stages of a project it's 10x. When the project matures, it becomes 0.1x, as majority of work is now bug fixes, technical support and office politics.
908B64B197 4y ago
> You earn as much as your colleagues. That's one way of running a tech company but what you'll end up with is going to look more like one of those comically bad bodyshops that's used for outsourcing. These have a turnover so high it's almost impossible to find someone with more than two years of experience. And, well, the results speak for themselves. Truth is, the 10x will eventually leave when someone from his circle points out he has a much better comp package than him and lure him for an interview (and will, of course, cash that 10K referral bonus). But the 1x and 0.1x will sure stick around for many years.
PainfullyNormal 4y ago
here's a secret: these things aren't constant. Everybody has been a 10x engineer for at least one day in their career. Everybody has also been a -10x engineer for at least one day in their career. Most of us spend our time sliding somewhere between the two extremes depending on our mood, how interested we are in this particular part of the project, whether we're distracted by health issues, etc.
mbrodersen 4y ago
I have worked with 10x developers more than once and they were not at all like how you describe. They didn’t work harder than the rest. Quite the opposite. They were quite lazy. However what they did do was carefully avoiding making the bad mistakes everybody else around them were making all the time, focusing on simplicity and straightforward solutions. That’s all they had to do to completely outperform everybody else while probably only truly working a few hours a day. They almost never had to fix bugs because their code just worked 99.99% of the time with zero bugs. Very impressive.
thow34wqway 4y ago
wow. That's deep. TLDR: Don't get stuck at "0.1x". Do leetcode and switch while you get competitive salary. In a new company you are usually 1x for the first year. You might be a 10x for a while after the first year then some thing changes like a project move or disagreement with technical decisions/manager/raise then you become 1x and then 0.1x. This is a dangerous time. Better switch. If you don't in the next appraisal cycle you will get compensation below you skill level and then its hard to get your compensation back.

denimnerd42 4y ago

how about the negative 1x or negative 10x developers. you soak up tons of time of other developers' mentoring time while never "learning how to fish". you can't figure out how to solve problems so you're always stuck. you choose the wrong path of investigation and waste weeks on the wrong line. you won't post your code for review until it's "ready" so no one's ever sure really how to help you or your progress. people complain about you to managers but nothing is done. you get good reviews. you earn as much as your colleagues.

koonsolo 4y ago
That definitely exists too. But I guess they already have some chance of getting fired.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  I actually think they get promoted for shipping something exceedingly complex and challenging that still barely works. It doesn't matter if a much simpler, robust solution was passed over.
- hnfong 4y ago
  There are costs to firing people (morale, hiring overhead, other risks etc) so often they are kept around for a couple years on the hope that they will somehow improve. 0.1 devs are actually fine, they don’t really exist unless they stare at YouTube for 36 hours each week. Usually when incompetent devs start to do something the result turns negative quite quickly.
tester756 4y ago
guesses problems reasons instead of try to debug I worked with person who told his/her manager that "they [mozilla] decreased stack size in firefox[0] and that's why app doesn't work because there was a lot of recursive calls under the hood cuz they used knockout.js or something like that" the actual reason was some null or some other trivial thing [0] I checked that later and they even increased it in last versions.
shagie 4y ago
That's the Net Negative Producing Programmer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf
pnutjam 4y ago
Or, you build complex structures to perform automation, but never finish them. You spend alot of time and energy maintaining the house of cards and finishing the non-automated parts without letting others know what you're doing. You move on and the house of cards all falls down. <Been in the cleanup phase of this multiple times>
zigzag312 4y ago
or you rewrite something that worked fine, with buggy half-backed implementation that uses some new overhyped library/language :)

zamadatix 4y ago

The 1x and 10x can much easier change into a high paying job at another company that doesn't pay all of its developers the same. The problem with that is a lot more people think they are 10x and others 0.1x when in reality most are ~1x so that leads to a lot of surprise about how even the pay is though.

koonsolo 4y ago
I only have experience in EU, and here I think a 10x might be able to get max 20% more. In practice, they might love the job more than the pay, and so make as much as the rest. The ones earning more money are the ones who negotiate. Edit: Sorry my explanation wasn't complete. In my opinion, getting a 10x developer has more to do with the work environment than with the developer. Some companies or structures just don't allow you to be a 10x developer.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > in EU, and here I think a 10x might be able to get max 20% more. More like 200% more. There's a lot of Europeans here in the Valley, but almost no Americans in Europe. There's a reason for that. There are also "dark matter devs" in Europe that are working remotely for SV companies, at SV salaries. They simply won't ever show up for interviews at local companies. > In my opinion, getting a 10x developer has more to do with the work environment than with the developer. I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Next summer they tried to get him back but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. Of course, he wouldn't return. That's when they realized a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to them; they lucked out hiring him that summer but there was no chance they could attract someone like him full time.

usrn 4y ago

This was the post I needed to read today. Thanks.

random3 4y ago

Hahhaah - I was about to post a similar comment. I think there's a default engineer level and then 0.1 or the -10x :) The -10x will create complexity that cannot be undone. This said an engineer is just an engineer. The problem is many coders are not engineers.

thow34wqway 4y ago
10x is real. Those programmers are still alive. Example Jeff Dean.
- random3 4y ago
  Also John Carmak and ton that are not well known. The point is it's a relative measure that is overused. Is Jeff Dean 10x relative to John Carmak? :) Irrelavant? Yes. Is the 0.1x and -10x more relevant? perhaps :)

ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago

Key callout: "You earn as much as your colleagues." Theres no reward for being 10x at 99% of companies. If youre that good, start your own company.

turnsout 4y ago
I think "10X" is a goofy concept, but I have absolutely worked with developers who have dramatically more impact than their coworkers. To a person, none of them wanted to start their own company. In my experience, they want to come to work, write great code, go home at 5pm and collect a paycheck. With that said, there are plenty of entrepreneurs and technical co-founders who think they're 10X developers. That's how you end up with large legacy Ruby codebases (I kid, I kid)
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
  Yeah youre correct, I'm talking money wise, you dont get paid 10x your colleagues, maybe 1.5x.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

Dunno, I feel the 0.1x-thing is often a function of obstacles in the way of productivity. At my last job, I was part of a crack team of senior consultants spent months building a CRUD service that basically did nothing but passing data from incoming requests to another API, and then doing the same with the responses. Because the service was distributed, this was asynchronous, and state was persisted in a byzantine state machine. By God were all the buzzword dev-ops checkmarks green. The entire team spent most days navigating a maze of elaborate OpenAPI specs, trying to make sense of nebulous kubernetes failure states, and debugging spontaneously self-breaking Jenkins pipelines that took a full hour to run each time regardless of fail or success. Hours were spent documenting the work, multiple daily standups, updating Jiras with elaborate definitions of done, time reporting in multiple tracking systems. It could take a full week of this stuff to bring a trivial code change into production. That was at most 0.1x development. I spent a lot of time browsing the internet because I literally couldn't affect the speed of the work, I was always waiting for some process somewhere to decide to finish so I could repeat the cycle. Note: Many of these things are necessary sometimes in larger projects. This was not a large project, but it was run as though it was, leading to a development workload that was almost entirely process overhead. In my spare time, I developed an internet search engine, and quite literally was 100x more productive than I was in my dayjob because I had none of that bullshit in the way.

gsibble 4y ago

I can be all 3 of those things at the same job. Just depends upon how I'm feeling that day.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

Often, at initial stages of a project it's 10x. When the project matures, it becomes 0.1x, as majority of work is now bug fixes, technical support and office politics.

908B64B197 4y ago

> You earn as much as your colleagues. That's one way of running a tech company but what you'll end up with is going to look more like one of those comically bad bodyshops that's used for outsourcing. These have a turnover so high it's almost impossible to find someone with more than two years of experience. And, well, the results speak for themselves. Truth is, the 10x will eventually leave when someone from his circle points out he has a much better comp package than him and lure him for an interview (and will, of course, cash that 10K referral bonus). But the 1x and 0.1x will sure stick around for many years.

PainfullyNormal 4y ago

here's a secret: these things aren't constant. Everybody has been a 10x engineer for at least one day in their career. Everybody has also been a -10x engineer for at least one day in their career. Most of us spend our time sliding somewhere between the two extremes depending on our mood, how interested we are in this particular part of the project, whether we're distracted by health issues, etc.

mbrodersen 4y ago

I have worked with 10x developers more than once and they were not at all like how you describe. They didn’t work harder than the rest. Quite the opposite. They were quite lazy. However what they did do was carefully avoiding making the bad mistakes everybody else around them were making all the time, focusing on simplicity and straightforward solutions. That’s all they had to do to completely outperform everybody else while probably only truly working a few hours a day. They almost never had to fix bugs because their code just worked 99.99% of the time with zero bugs. Very impressive.

thow34wqway 4y ago

wow. That's deep. TLDR: Don't get stuck at "0.1x". Do leetcode and switch while you get competitive salary. In a new company you are usually 1x for the first year. You might be a 10x for a while after the first year then some thing changes like a project move or disagreement with technical decisions/manager/raise then you become 1x and then 0.1x. This is a dangerous time. Better switch. If you don't in the next appraisal cycle you will get compensation below you skill level and then its hard to get your compensation back.