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Fred Brooks' original statement re: 10x was that the best programmers were ten times as productive as the worst programmers, not the average programmer.
by jp57 4y ago
Fred Brooks' original statement re: 10x was that the best programmers were ten times as productive as the worst programmers, not the average programmer.
- nepeckman 4y agoThis is the key bit of information that is always missed in discussions of "10x engineers". 10x better than the absolute worst, but probably 2x better than average. This lines up with my informal, anecdotal experience where the absolute best engineers I've worked with usually perform 2-3x better than average.
- karaterobot 4y agoFrom how I see it used, here and elsewhere, "10x" now just means "really good". As with so many terms, this one got recast to be whatever people assumed it meant without looking into it. Whatever (thin) science was behind it in the first place got abandoned in favor of something more poetical and less factual. This is how language seems to work in general: we stand on a pile of misinterpretations. But with terms that originated in the context of a specific usage in research, it can be frustrating.