17 ms·

Stop saying 10x developer

51 points by Hbruz0 4y ago

skered 4y ago
11x developer.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
giantg2 4y ago
I'm a .5x dev...
- hahaxdxd123 4y ago
  Oh, I'm a .10x dev I work at a Big Tech company so my $/hour ratio is pretty nuts.
  - moritzwarhier 4y ago
    Very corporate-y, your addition of the trailing zero decimal digit. Sorry for the useless comment :)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
bhaney 4y ago
glouwbug 4y ago
It baffles me that anyone would want to tie the entirety of their self worth to their corporate career. Personally, no amount of extra effort has ever led to the reward I deemed suitable, so why work harder? The winners are the 0.75x - 1.5x engineers, those otherwise known as the Losers according to the Gervais Principle [1] [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- JediLuke 4y ago
- drc500free 4y ago
  I always struggle sending that link to people, because only a certain kind of analytical brain can ignore the emotional weight of labels like "Sociopath" and "Loser" for 20k words. It is one of the most profound essays I've read about business. All models are wrong, but this one has been particularly useful to my career progression. Apparently we needed to wait a decade to rename "Losers" as "Quiet Quitters."
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Here's a decent spin on it from Daedtech: https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ Sociopaths -> Opportunists Clueless -> Idealists Losers -> Pragmatists
    - gene_takavic 4y ago
      There’s also the language of Michael O. Church, our fallen hero: Losers: subordinate and strategic, not dedicated. Clueless: subordinate and dedicated, not strategic. Sociopaths: dedicated and strategic, not subordinate. The unicorn of all three doesn’t exist because it’s never strategic to be both dedicated and subordinate: you always get better results if you pick one or the other and stay in that lane.
      - yeeyeeyee 4y ago
        All of these models assume the following two things: 1. nobody likes their job 2. nobody thinks their work has any value besides what they are paid In swe plenty of people like their job, everybody's paid like 200k now, and unless you're working on crud internal tools you get to work on something relatively important. But yeah if you have a shit job then you can browse HN at work and philosophize about sociopaths and losers.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Is this the contemporary version of Bloody Mary? 10x developer, 10x developer, 10x developer…
- threatripper 4y ago
  Yeah, what job do you offer?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twirlock 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
woopwoop 4y ago
Not sure about the existence of 10x engineers, but I'm quite certain of the existence of -10x engineers.
- cellis 4y ago
  Let’s not forget the -100x sr. managers and -1000x engineering directors…
- maximus-decimus 4y ago
  Those are the ones who update your repo without verifying it even compiles and then you have to have to investigate without any context when the CI pipeline yells at you because your integration tests are failing.
c54 4y ago
I'm a 1x engineer
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Self-diagnosed or calibrated against an UL-approved reference engineer?
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I'm anywhere from a 0.1x developer to a 10x developer, depending on circumstances. Talent comes and experience enters into it, although I think I'm far from the best at anything. The rest is just being allowed to actually get things done. I've worked in teams that, as a whole, were significantly less productive than I am working alone, even though I was very much part of the team. Not that any of the developers on the team was bad or anything. It's just we spent 20% of the time in meetings, 30% of the time debugging broken jenkins pipelines and kubernetes jobs, 10% of the time rolling back changes because stakeholders changed their mind, 25% of the time fixing the bugs introduced by rolling back the changes, 5% of the time having coffee and playing pingpong, 10% of the time agreeing on the design, 7% of the time in standups and other agile rigmarole, and the remaining 3% of the time developing the system.
prepend 4y ago
I’ve definitely worked with 10x developers and 0.1x ones. It seems weird to deny they exist and to not seek them out for your organization.
- threatripper 4y ago
  The 10x developers are way more dangerous to the status-quo in an established company than the 0.1x developers. If your business-system is up and running don't change it. Milk the cow and then move on. That method worked for many years.
  - apsurd 4y ago
    That seem easily true by looking at historical examples. But history isn't proof for future outcomes and dare I say our "age of tech" actively seems disprove all these historical truisms. Innovate or die kinda thing. But, we are watching all this play out live, so who's to say. FWIW I am not betting that the old status-quo is meaningfully better.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    That has a survivorship bias, not all cows survived the milking
    - threatripper 4y ago
      That's why you should not be the cow.
- xupybd 4y ago
  I don't think the article is saying the don't exist. It's saying that they only exist within a specific context. They're 10x in one domain. But it's also saying that what they're calling 10x could be a developer with a skill set that might not be possible for another developer to compete with, even if given infinite time.
  - prepend 4y ago
dilyevsky 4y ago
Offtopic - I read Tom Demarco so long ago that I completely forgot that’s where 10x’er apparently comes from (maybe also JoS blog?). I find more and more that today’s eng managers haven’t read any of his books and was wondering if others noticed the same?
m4jor 4y ago
10x developer
SomeCallMeTim 4y ago
Good article, though I can't agree with the conclusion. "Expert" doesn't really communicate much. There's a meme that's probably older than I am that goes something like: "An expert is no different from the rest of us, he just has a binder and slides." Today it would probably be a PowerPoint presentation, but the point stands: Expert has been an overused and overloaded term for far longer than 10x, and other than specifying a focus ("video encoding expert" or similar) it is insufficient to actually communicate to non-technical people the distinction. Saying specialist is also descriptive of your focus, but similarly doesn't get to the underlying difference between and average and a 10x developer. A video compression specialist is going to be really good at video compression, and maybe that's because they're really familiar with the math and the domain. And that means they could create compression algorithms much faster than I could; I don't know the technical details of any compression algorithms to the degree that I'd even consider taking such a job. Some tasks are best handled by experts or specialists; that's fine and appropriate. But a generalist "10x" developer can typically handle many domains. In fact, jumping between domains is not uncommon. Their "expertise" is in being able to grok complex systems and multiple levels of indirection and interaction; what the systems are doing is less important. Maybe the video compression specialist is also a 10x developer, but just prefers to stay in the video compression space; that's fine. But I've seen code written by specialists were really good at their specialty, and their code worked...but it was not good code. And one hallmark of a 10x developer is that the code is good. So both expert and specialist are really orthogonal to 10x.
- survirtual 4y ago
  10x is definitely not a good descriptor. Sometimes, having someone like this on a team is the difference between something being possible and something being impossible. In other words, you could hire 100x average devs and they will not be able to get the job done, but a single person like this may be able to. There is a threshold one must cross which involves constructing neural connections across unexpected boundaries. Dipping your hands into many domains makes you below average in each domain to start, but after some amount of solving any problem without concern of specializing, they begin to solve each other. Techniques from one specialty apply to another. Bridges forms and possibilities materialize. Within the possibility spaces of intersecting domains exists solution sets that can sometimes be exponentially more efficient. People with access to that are hard to identify. They often do not have traditional backgrounds, get bored easily, have a disdain for hierarchy, and want equitable compensation relative to the possibilities they allow to be open — otherwise known as compensation in the neighborhood of c-level staff. If you are someone with these abilities, know your value. You make or break a company. Do not allow yourself to give your abilities away while a sales or marketing person parasitically leaches off of you while making you feel small.
ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
10X developers exist, and its painful for existing senior software engineers to welcome one on the team. They are also much rarer than people want to admit, and don't write software the way a "good senior engineer" does.
- sdwr 4y ago
  Mind elaborating on this? This is a fresh take for me. Are you saying a 10x dev writes code optimized for their own velocity, at the expense of accessibility/teamwork?
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    I consider myself above average and a key distinction is not wanting to build complexity. Microservices, k8s, fancy languages, or integration into things like Dynamica CRM are all generally mistakes unless you have a very good reason for doing so. I also spent a lot of time optimising my workflow, which leverages build/test on change and large volumes of automations. Unit tests are also key.
    - yupper32 4y ago
      I've had people on my team with these views and often their expectations need to be re-calibrated. They want to spend their time rewriting the codebase their way instead of being actually productive. Those people are not 10x engineers, despite them sometimes thinking they are. (Not saying that's you, I don't know you).
      - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
        I think that re-engineering code based needs to be a calculated decisions, but i also think that there’s a large amount of resume driven development too. There are places where there’s a need for k8s and similar, but largely that’s when you’re at google level scale. For the rest of us plebs, maybe leveraging simpler paas solutions or traditional mechanisms are more effective. Except CRM. If you’re building in CRM you’re just making a mess, no matter what the rationale is.
hazyc 4y ago
The whole '10x better' thing needs to chill out. Almost every time the phrase it used it's applied to something that can't even be accurately measured. "This product is 10x better" - okay, that's probably just your subjective opinion that you're dressing up as quantifiable fact. A small # of people are much better at their jobs than everyone else - this seems to be true - but it applies everywhere and it's not always '10x'. It might actually be that someone is twice as good or three times as productive, but we still slap a '10x' on the description.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
Of course the article is right, but the initial Twitter thread that sparked the whole concept is beyond laughable. > 10x engineers hate meetings. They think it is a waste of time, and obvious things are being discussed. Engineers understand the value of meetings. This is the sign of a 0x engineer. It's the sign of a 10x code monkey. No legitimate business needs code monkeys.
bluelightning2k 4y ago
If you say 10x developer 10x then Jeff Dean appears behind you.
tamrix 4y ago
The blog post is a few years late https://1x.engineer/ https://1x.engineer/
iratewizard 4y ago
The author is being overly semantic about a widely observed phenomenon in order to sling his devops. He's saying the phrase isn't good because a 10x developer given grunt work couldn't actually churn it at 10x speeds, but they're capable of doing complex work 95x+ faster than an average dev. It adds nothing to the discussion and is feel good drivel for insecure developers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pdimitar 4y ago
I've been "a 10x dev" several times, "a 1x dev" a lot of times and "a 0.1x dev" some amount of times. Productivity is a complex function with many variables. I've also seen some super motivated and creative individuals barely tie their shoes and take a full minute to respond to basic questions on some days. The "10x dev" is mostly a meme indeed. It absolutely does happen but it's not something you can just have more of. The employers are free to keep dreaming of human robots though, if that helps them sleep better at night. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
rvz 4y ago
Ok 10x developer.
jwie 4y ago
Being a 10x, or aspiring to be such a thing, is a bit odd. You should strive to improve the output of others. Being a .5x developer, but giving everyone on your team a small multiplier on impactful work is far more valuable than prolific output. In fact we call these people “Director of Engineering” or maybe “Principal Software Engineer” etc.
- chucknthem 4y ago
  The few "10x developers" I've had the privilege of working with are also multipliers of other people. They can learn, debug and build things maybe 3x-5x as fast as a good developer, but give them 2-10 good developers, they can help each of them solve problems 2x as fast or build frameworks that let them be 2x as productive and that's how they get another 10x.
tyleo 4y ago
I don’t know that the scale is quite 10x but some engineers certainly have whole-number productivity multiples vs others. I could identify several of these folks at my workplace. Also w.r.t. the points made about meetings, having gone from a large organization with many meetings to another large organization with few folks are definitely wasting time in meetings in some contexts and the best engineers at the first org would bias towards avoiding meetings.
Apocryphon 4y ago
While 10x developers certainly exist, the term often feels like the engineering equivalent to HR/recruiting's buzzphrase of "rockstar ninja developer." You know one when you see them, you want one on your team, but to talk about it too much in the hypothetical feels a little embarrassing, like woolgathering wish-fulfillment.
logicchop 4y ago
I think this is worrying too much about a particular interpretation of "10x" and ignores the subterranean fact that people are trying to convey. There just are super-valuable devs. Everyone knows this. They stick out. And they are productive in a myriad of ways. Some are leetcode superstars, sure. But some are simply masters of unblocking the rest of the team. It's hard to even associate a particular skillset with it. But I'm sure most of you have a list in your head of the people you would absolutely want to poach if you were starting up something new.
atoav 4y ago
I work at job where I am a developer. The problem is they made me do other jobs as well. There was one situation that took me out of the usual roles and obligations (meetings etc.) and made me just a developer. Who would have known, I managed to get done 10x the amount of work that time. Maybe even 100x. How much potential is wasted on distracting your employees from the one task they should actually be doing at that point?
vcryan 4y ago
It's hard to believe the whole 10x thing until you've seen it. I've been working as a software engineer for 25 years, and I worked with 1 person who was overtly ahead of everyone else by a significant, possibly 10x degree. Actually a really humble person, would probably hate this label. Intensely focused, avid reader of tech source materials, and somewhat intuitively gravitated towards sound/simplistic solutions to problems other people had a hard time even understanding. It's a thing.
- unreal37 4y ago
  I've seen it too. It's a thing. Didn't like the person and they were anti-social to a great degree. The company treated him like a diva and he was I guess. But he could go into his office, shut the door, and the next day we'd have some working component to the larger system largely coded. So you can't argue he wasn't a 10x coder. But a 0.1x communicator.
- deterministic 4y ago
  Agree. 30+ years of experience here. I have worked with developers that single handily made the difference between success and failure. So they are more than 10x engineers.
seba_dos1 4y ago
There are no 10x developers. Well, I guess ADHD developers may sometimes resemble something like 10x developers when you look at them from the outside, but that's only half of the picture.
ffhhj 4y ago
I know many 10x developers, they actually work 1/10 of their workweek, yet deliver 1x.
kareemsabri 4y ago
Surely they exist (10x lawyers, writers, chefs, photographers etc. also exist) but it's annoying to hear people who haven't written a line of code in decades pontificate about "how to spot one".
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
There is such a thing as a 10x developer. I've worked with them. They're "10x" because they have mastered a set a tools end-to-end that they use over and over again to achieve their goals. Examples: * Does it need a client-side website? Bootstrap + jQuery * Does it need a server-side application? Python + Django * Does it need data persistence? PostgreSQL + Redis * Does it need asynchronous tasks? Python + Celery * Does it need a web server? nginx * Does it need infrastructure? AWS + Terraform * Does it need to scale? Yes. * Does it need ? (you name it) Add that all up and the people that can deliver those apps/features are extremely rare. Those are the 10x developers. And I'm not even talking about just using those components. I'm talking about using them expertly. Highly optimized.
- xupybd 4y ago
  If you only need persistence why use Redis and Postgres. Postgres would talk care of the persistence? Not a dig I'm just trying to understand the use case. I thought Redis was only used for high speed queues?
zwieback 4y ago
Maybe my career in metrology has me jaded but I think you have to: 1) Define a metric meaningful for whatever you're interested in, e.g. developer productivty 2) Find a way of accurately measuring that metric (surely not LOC) 3) Do some R&Rs (repeatability and reproducability) and other gage studies 4) Use this metric to your advantage In that narrow sense I'm sure some 10x, 20x, ... developers exist but you can't plug and play them.
motohagiography 4y ago
So if one were 2x or 5x, which would make one too clever by half? Not a developer at all, asking for friend.
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>The 10X meme is both too extreme, by implying that Fabrice Bellard [4] could kick out simple crud tasks at 10X the speed I do, and not extreme enough, suggesting that I could build ffmpeg and qemu the same as Fabrice if I was just given more time. > [4] Fabrice has created so many amazing pieces of software The sheer diversity of different fields in which Fabrice has written top notch software undermines the author’s point that 10x developers only exist as specialists. And yes, I think Fabrice would be 10x as productive at boring CRUD work, by finding some clever way to automate it.
LtWorf 4y ago
Seems to be an unironical modern version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_P...
hbrn 4y ago
This is probably not a common interpretation, but I've always viewed the idea of 10x developer as someone who delivers 10x the value. Not necessarily 10x lines of code or even 10x story points. 1x developer might look at the problem and think "this is an interesting and challenging problem to solve, I'll solve it in a week". He solves it in 2 weeks, and despite failing his own deadline feels really good about himself. After all he solved a problem. 10x developer might look at the same problem and think "this is an interesting and challenging problem to solve. I'm not going to solve it today because the impact is too low and cost of the solution is higher than cost of the problem". 1x developer might ship 500 lines of code per day. 10x developer deletes 50 lines of code per day, and ships a 100. 1x developer is good at solving problems. 10x developer is good at not creating problems in the first place.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  And then there are, less abstractly, developers like Jarred Sumner who develop a product by themselves and then gets $7m in funding and starts a company. Many interesting projects begin with a crew of one, sometimes produced by balancing between work hours and personal hours. Meanwhile many competent and useful people will never achieve such output in their entire lifetime. So what magnitude do we assign to this difference? Is that 10x? 100x? Infinity? Whatever the case, it's "a lot" more and the exact measure of these metaphorical numbers are beside the point.
- gene_takavic 4y ago
  I disagree. Our technical woes are not caused by the teeming masses of 1x developers, locally solving small problems but creating bigger ones. Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source: the fact that we answer to capitalists, people who hold private wealth and will do absolutely anything to retain it, even if it means covering the world in lahars of shit. If we don’t fix that problem and overthrow the corporate system, there is literally no point in anything we do.
  - hbrn 4y ago
    Capitalism might have it's downsides, but I came to think that software engineering problems are deeply rooted in human psychology. > Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source It's tempting to think that all the world problems are coming from a single source and therefore have a simple solution, but usually that's not the case. Leftists will always blame capitalism. Feminists will blame toxic masculinity (most developers are men, right?). Nazis will blame Jews. Every ideology claims it solves every possible problem, but it never does.
gene_takavic 4y ago
“10x” is also terrible because it shows complete social incompetence. What developers think they are saying is that they deserve a 10x salary (and that their bosses, out of the goodness of their hearts, will just give it to them). What they are actually doing is legitimizing metrics (that they will not control for very long) and micromanagement. They’re basically saying their colleagues are all 0.1x compared to then and should be fired… and it’s because we all so quickly knife each other that MBAs, individually less intelligent than us but with far more collective intelligence, end up ruling us.
ergocoder 4y ago
I don't know why they say 10x developers don't exist. In my company, some people merge 600 PRs a year, and some only merge 50 PRs. When you look at the performance, there is an obvious correlation between good performance and PRs. They fix a lot of random stuffs in adjacent areas and finish their main projects. Of course, this correlation is not true 100% of the time.
- EduardoRT 4y ago
  It's so stupid if you dumb it down even further, it's so obvious that there are people that will be worth 10x more in every field, just compare the worst developer you know with the best developer you know, the difference it's probably way more than ten-fold; same thing with a doctor, scientist, mathematician, etc.
incomingpain 4y ago
>Development skills vary and can be improved. I don’t think anyone argues that point. But are people really 10x better at tasks than non-incompetent colleagues? Yes and in fact 10x is too small a number. 10x engineers is inaccurate to be sure. It's simple formula. Your productivity / your average team member's productivity. If your average team member accomplishes nothing or in some cases causes problems and doesnt solve any problems. You are dividing by 0 or a very very small decimal number. In my experience because of social media and such. Most people dont pay attention while at work. I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen coworkers sleeping in their cube. How many people doomscroll reddit or facebook while at work?Basically everyone. So who are the 10x engineers? The people who aren't wasting time. The people who are engaged and paying attention. The people who are actually working unlike most.
electric_dreams 4y ago

51 points by Hbruz0 4y ago

skered 4y ago

11x developer.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

giantg2 4y ago

I'm a .5x dev...

hahaxdxd123 4y ago
Oh, I'm a .10x dev I work at a Big Tech company so my $/hour ratio is pretty nuts.
- moritzwarhier 4y ago
  Very corporate-y, your addition of the trailing zero decimal digit. Sorry for the useless comment :)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

bhaney 4y ago

glouwbug 4y ago

It baffles me that anyone would want to tie the entirety of their self worth to their corporate career. Personally, no amount of extra effort has ever led to the reward I deemed suitable, so why work harder? The winners are the 0.75x - 1.5x engineers, those otherwise known as the Losers according to the Gervais Principle [1] [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

JediLuke 4y ago
drc500free 4y ago
I always struggle sending that link to people, because only a certain kind of analytical brain can ignore the emotional weight of labels like "Sociopath" and "Loser" for 20k words. It is one of the most profound essays I've read about business. All models are wrong, but this one has been particularly useful to my career progression. Apparently we needed to wait a decade to rename "Losers" as "Quiet Quitters."
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Here's a decent spin on it from Daedtech: https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/ Sociopaths -> Opportunists Clueless -> Idealists Losers -> Pragmatists
  - gene_takavic 4y ago
    There’s also the language of Michael O. Church, our fallen hero: Losers: subordinate and strategic, not dedicated. Clueless: subordinate and dedicated, not strategic. Sociopaths: dedicated and strategic, not subordinate. The unicorn of all three doesn’t exist because it’s never strategic to be both dedicated and subordinate: you always get better results if you pick one or the other and stay in that lane.
    - yeeyeeyee 4y ago
      All of these models assume the following two things: 1. nobody likes their job 2. nobody thinks their work has any value besides what they are paid In swe plenty of people like their job, everybody's paid like 200k now, and unless you're working on crud internal tools you get to work on something relatively important. But yeah if you have a shit job then you can browse HN at work and philosophize about sociopaths and losers.

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

Is this the contemporary version of Bloody Mary? 10x developer, 10x developer, 10x developer…

threatripper 4y ago
Yeah, what job do you offer?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

twirlock 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

woopwoop 4y ago

Not sure about the existence of 10x engineers, but I'm quite certain of the existence of -10x engineers.

cellis 4y ago
Let’s not forget the -100x sr. managers and -1000x engineering directors…
maximus-decimus 4y ago
Those are the ones who update your repo without verifying it even compiles and then you have to have to investigate without any context when the CI pipeline yells at you because your integration tests are failing.

c54 4y ago

I'm a 1x engineer

rzzzt 4y ago
Self-diagnosed or calibrated against an UL-approved reference engineer?
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I'm anywhere from a 0.1x developer to a 10x developer, depending on circumstances. Talent comes and experience enters into it, although I think I'm far from the best at anything. The rest is just being allowed to actually get things done. I've worked in teams that, as a whole, were significantly less productive than I am working alone, even though I was very much part of the team. Not that any of the developers on the team was bad or anything. It's just we spent 20% of the time in meetings, 30% of the time debugging broken jenkins pipelines and kubernetes jobs, 10% of the time rolling back changes because stakeholders changed their mind, 25% of the time fixing the bugs introduced by rolling back the changes, 5% of the time having coffee and playing pingpong, 10% of the time agreeing on the design, 7% of the time in standups and other agile rigmarole, and the remaining 3% of the time developing the system.

prepend 4y ago

I’ve definitely worked with 10x developers and 0.1x ones. It seems weird to deny they exist and to not seek them out for your organization.

threatripper 4y ago
The 10x developers are way more dangerous to the status-quo in an established company than the 0.1x developers. If your business-system is up and running don't change it. Milk the cow and then move on. That method worked for many years.
- apsurd 4y ago
  That seem easily true by looking at historical examples. But history isn't proof for future outcomes and dare I say our "age of tech" actively seems disprove all these historical truisms. Innovate or die kinda thing. But, we are watching all this play out live, so who's to say. FWIW I am not betting that the old status-quo is meaningfully better.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  That has a survivorship bias, not all cows survived the milking
  - threatripper 4y ago
    That's why you should not be the cow.
xupybd 4y ago
I don't think the article is saying the don't exist. It's saying that they only exist within a specific context. They're 10x in one domain. But it's also saying that what they're calling 10x could be a developer with a skill set that might not be possible for another developer to compete with, even if given infinite time.
- prepend 4y ago

dilyevsky 4y ago

Offtopic - I read Tom Demarco so long ago that I completely forgot that’s where 10x’er apparently comes from (maybe also JoS blog?). I find more and more that today’s eng managers haven’t read any of his books and was wondering if others noticed the same?

m4jor 4y ago

10x developer

SomeCallMeTim 4y ago

Good article, though I can't agree with the conclusion. "Expert" doesn't really communicate much. There's a meme that's probably older than I am that goes something like: "An expert is no different from the rest of us, he just has a binder and slides." Today it would probably be a PowerPoint presentation, but the point stands: Expert has been an overused and overloaded term for far longer than 10x, and other than specifying a focus ("video encoding expert" or similar) it is insufficient to actually communicate to non-technical people the distinction. Saying specialist is also descriptive of your focus, but similarly doesn't get to the underlying difference between and average and a 10x developer. A video compression specialist is going to be really good at video compression, and maybe that's because they're really familiar with the math and the domain. And that means they could create compression algorithms much faster than I could; I don't know the technical details of any compression algorithms to the degree that I'd even consider taking such a job. Some tasks are best handled by experts or specialists; that's fine and appropriate. But a generalist "10x" developer can typically handle many domains. In fact, jumping between domains is not uncommon. Their "expertise" is in being able to grok complex systems and multiple levels of indirection and interaction; what the systems are doing is less important. Maybe the video compression specialist is also a 10x developer, but just prefers to stay in the video compression space; that's fine. But I've seen code written by specialists were really good at their specialty, and their code worked...but it was not good code. And one hallmark of a 10x developer is that the code is good. So both expert and specialist are really orthogonal to 10x.

survirtual 4y ago
10x is definitely not a good descriptor. Sometimes, having someone like this on a team is the difference between something being possible and something being impossible. In other words, you could hire 100x average devs and they will not be able to get the job done, but a single person like this may be able to. There is a threshold one must cross which involves constructing neural connections across unexpected boundaries. Dipping your hands into many domains makes you below average in each domain to start, but after some amount of solving any problem without concern of specializing, they begin to solve each other. Techniques from one specialty apply to another. Bridges forms and possibilities materialize. Within the possibility spaces of intersecting domains exists solution sets that can sometimes be exponentially more efficient. People with access to that are hard to identify. They often do not have traditional backgrounds, get bored easily, have a disdain for hierarchy, and want equitable compensation relative to the possibilities they allow to be open — otherwise known as compensation in the neighborhood of c-level staff. If you are someone with these abilities, know your value. You make or break a company. Do not allow yourself to give your abilities away while a sales or marketing person parasitically leaches off of you while making you feel small.

ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago

10X developers exist, and its painful for existing senior software engineers to welcome one on the team. They are also much rarer than people want to admit, and don't write software the way a "good senior engineer" does.

sdwr 4y ago
Mind elaborating on this? This is a fresh take for me. Are you saying a 10x dev writes code optimized for their own velocity, at the expense of accessibility/teamwork?
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  I consider myself above average and a key distinction is not wanting to build complexity. Microservices, k8s, fancy languages, or integration into things like Dynamica CRM are all generally mistakes unless you have a very good reason for doing so. I also spent a lot of time optimising my workflow, which leverages build/test on change and large volumes of automations. Unit tests are also key.
  - yupper32 4y ago
    I've had people on my team with these views and often their expectations need to be re-calibrated. They want to spend their time rewriting the codebase their way instead of being actually productive. Those people are not 10x engineers, despite them sometimes thinking they are. (Not saying that's you, I don't know you).
    - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
      I think that re-engineering code based needs to be a calculated decisions, but i also think that there’s a large amount of resume driven development too. There are places where there’s a need for k8s and similar, but largely that’s when you’re at google level scale. For the rest of us plebs, maybe leveraging simpler paas solutions or traditional mechanisms are more effective. Except CRM. If you’re building in CRM you’re just making a mess, no matter what the rationale is.

hazyc 4y ago

The whole '10x better' thing needs to chill out. Almost every time the phrase it used it's applied to something that can't even be accurately measured. "This product is 10x better" - okay, that's probably just your subjective opinion that you're dressing up as quantifiable fact. A small # of people are much better at their jobs than everyone else - this seems to be true - but it applies everywhere and it's not always '10x'. It might actually be that someone is twice as good or three times as productive, but we still slap a '10x' on the description.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

Of course the article is right, but the initial Twitter thread that sparked the whole concept is beyond laughable. > 10x engineers hate meetings. They think it is a waste of time, and obvious things are being discussed. Engineers understand the value of meetings. This is the sign of a 0x engineer. It's the sign of a 10x code monkey. No legitimate business needs code monkeys.

bluelightning2k 4y ago

If you say 10x developer 10x then Jeff Dean appears behind you.

tamrix 4y ago

The blog post is a few years late https://1x.engineer/ https://1x.engineer/

iratewizard 4y ago

The author is being overly semantic about a widely observed phenomenon in order to sling his devops. He's saying the phrase isn't good because a 10x developer given grunt work couldn't actually churn it at 10x speeds, but they're capable of doing complex work 95x+ faster than an average dev. It adds nothing to the discussion and is feel good drivel for insecure developers.

deleted 4y ago

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pdimitar 4y ago

I've been "a 10x dev" several times, "a 1x dev" a lot of times and "a 0.1x dev" some amount of times. Productivity is a complex function with many variables. I've also seen some super motivated and creative individuals barely tie their shoes and take a full minute to respond to basic questions on some days. The "10x dev" is mostly a meme indeed. It absolutely does happen but it's not something you can just have more of. The employers are free to keep dreaming of human robots though, if that helps them sleep better at night. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

rvz 4y ago

Ok 10x developer.

jwie 4y ago

Being a 10x, or aspiring to be such a thing, is a bit odd. You should strive to improve the output of others. Being a .5x developer, but giving everyone on your team a small multiplier on impactful work is far more valuable than prolific output. In fact we call these people “Director of Engineering” or maybe “Principal Software Engineer” etc.

chucknthem 4y ago
The few "10x developers" I've had the privilege of working with are also multipliers of other people. They can learn, debug and build things maybe 3x-5x as fast as a good developer, but give them 2-10 good developers, they can help each of them solve problems 2x as fast or build frameworks that let them be 2x as productive and that's how they get another 10x.

tyleo 4y ago

I don’t know that the scale is quite 10x but some engineers certainly have whole-number productivity multiples vs others. I could identify several of these folks at my workplace. Also w.r.t. the points made about meetings, having gone from a large organization with many meetings to another large organization with few folks are definitely wasting time in meetings in some contexts and the best engineers at the first org would bias towards avoiding meetings.

Apocryphon 4y ago

While 10x developers certainly exist, the term often feels like the engineering equivalent to HR/recruiting's buzzphrase of "rockstar ninja developer." You know one when you see them, you want one on your team, but to talk about it too much in the hypothetical feels a little embarrassing, like woolgathering wish-fulfillment.

logicchop 4y ago

I think this is worrying too much about a particular interpretation of "10x" and ignores the subterranean fact that people are trying to convey. There just are super-valuable devs. Everyone knows this. They stick out. And they are productive in a myriad of ways. Some are leetcode superstars, sure. But some are simply masters of unblocking the rest of the team. It's hard to even associate a particular skillset with it. But I'm sure most of you have a list in your head of the people you would absolutely want to poach if you were starting up something new.

atoav 4y ago

I work at job where I am a developer. The problem is they made me do other jobs as well. There was one situation that took me out of the usual roles and obligations (meetings etc.) and made me just a developer. Who would have known, I managed to get done 10x the amount of work that time. Maybe even 100x. How much potential is wasted on distracting your employees from the one task they should actually be doing at that point?

vcryan 4y ago

It's hard to believe the whole 10x thing until you've seen it. I've been working as a software engineer for 25 years, and I worked with 1 person who was overtly ahead of everyone else by a significant, possibly 10x degree. Actually a really humble person, would probably hate this label. Intensely focused, avid reader of tech source materials, and somewhat intuitively gravitated towards sound/simplistic solutions to problems other people had a hard time even understanding. It's a thing.

unreal37 4y ago
I've seen it too. It's a thing. Didn't like the person and they were anti-social to a great degree. The company treated him like a diva and he was I guess. But he could go into his office, shut the door, and the next day we'd have some working component to the larger system largely coded. So you can't argue he wasn't a 10x coder. But a 0.1x communicator.
deterministic 4y ago
Agree. 30+ years of experience here. I have worked with developers that single handily made the difference between success and failure. So they are more than 10x engineers.

seba_dos1 4y ago

There are no 10x developers. Well, I guess ADHD developers may sometimes resemble something like 10x developers when you look at them from the outside, but that's only half of the picture.

ffhhj 4y ago

I know many 10x developers, they actually work 1/10 of their workweek, yet deliver 1x.

kareemsabri 4y ago

Surely they exist (10x lawyers, writers, chefs, photographers etc. also exist) but it's annoying to hear people who haven't written a line of code in decades pontificate about "how to spot one".

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago

There is such a thing as a 10x developer. I've worked with them. They're "10x" because they have mastered a set a tools end-to-end that they use over and over again to achieve their goals. Examples: * Does it need a client-side website? Bootstrap + jQuery * Does it need a server-side application? Python + Django * Does it need data persistence? PostgreSQL + Redis * Does it need asynchronous tasks? Python + Celery * Does it need a web server? nginx * Does it need infrastructure? AWS + Terraform * Does it need to scale? Yes. * Does it need ? (you name it) Add that all up and the people that can deliver those apps/features are extremely rare. Those are the 10x developers. And I'm not even talking about just using those components. I'm talking about using them expertly. Highly optimized.

xupybd 4y ago
If you only need persistence why use Redis and Postgres. Postgres would talk care of the persistence? Not a dig I'm just trying to understand the use case. I thought Redis was only used for high speed queues?

zwieback 4y ago

Maybe my career in metrology has me jaded but I think you have to: 1) Define a metric meaningful for whatever you're interested in, e.g. developer productivty 2) Find a way of accurately measuring that metric (surely not LOC) 3) Do some R&Rs (repeatability and reproducability) and other gage studies 4) Use this metric to your advantage In that narrow sense I'm sure some 10x, 20x, ... developers exist but you can't plug and play them.

motohagiography 4y ago

So if one were 2x or 5x, which would make one too clever by half? Not a developer at all, asking for friend.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

>The 10X meme is both too extreme, by implying that Fabrice Bellard [4] could kick out simple crud tasks at 10X the speed I do, and not extreme enough, suggesting that I could build ffmpeg and qemu the same as Fabrice if I was just given more time. > [4] Fabrice has created so many amazing pieces of software The sheer diversity of different fields in which Fabrice has written top notch software undermines the author’s point that 10x developers only exist as specialists. And yes, I think Fabrice would be 10x as productive at boring CRUD work, by finding some clever way to automate it.

LtWorf 4y ago

Seems to be an unironical modern version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_P...

hbrn 4y ago

This is probably not a common interpretation, but I've always viewed the idea of 10x developer as someone who delivers 10x the value. Not necessarily 10x lines of code or even 10x story points. 1x developer might look at the problem and think "this is an interesting and challenging problem to solve, I'll solve it in a week". He solves it in 2 weeks, and despite failing his own deadline feels really good about himself. After all he solved a problem. 10x developer might look at the same problem and think "this is an interesting and challenging problem to solve. I'm not going to solve it today because the impact is too low and cost of the solution is higher than cost of the problem". 1x developer might ship 500 lines of code per day. 10x developer deletes 50 lines of code per day, and ships a 100. 1x developer is good at solving problems. 10x developer is good at not creating problems in the first place.

threatofrain 4y ago
And then there are, less abstractly, developers like Jarred Sumner who develop a product by themselves and then gets $7m in funding and starts a company. Many interesting projects begin with a crew of one, sometimes produced by balancing between work hours and personal hours. Meanwhile many competent and useful people will never achieve such output in their entire lifetime. So what magnitude do we assign to this difference? Is that 10x? 100x? Infinity? Whatever the case, it's "a lot" more and the exact measure of these metaphorical numbers are beside the point.
gene_takavic 4y ago
I disagree. Our technical woes are not caused by the teeming masses of 1x developers, locally solving small problems but creating bigger ones. Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source: the fact that we answer to capitalists, people who hold private wealth and will do absolutely anything to retain it, even if it means covering the world in lahars of shit. If we don’t fix that problem and overthrow the corporate system, there is literally no point in anything we do.
- hbrn 4y ago
  Capitalism might have it's downsides, but I came to think that software engineering problems are deeply rooted in human psychology. > Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source It's tempting to think that all the world problems are coming from a single source and therefore have a simple solution, but usually that's not the case. Leftists will always blame capitalism. Feminists will blame toxic masculinity (most developers are men, right?). Nazis will blame Jews. Every ideology claims it solves every possible problem, but it never does.

gene_takavic 4y ago

“10x” is also terrible because it shows complete social incompetence. What developers think they are saying is that they deserve a 10x salary (and that their bosses, out of the goodness of their hearts, will just give it to them). What they are actually doing is legitimizing metrics (that they will not control for very long) and micromanagement. They’re basically saying their colleagues are all 0.1x compared to then and should be fired… and it’s because we all so quickly knife each other that MBAs, individually less intelligent than us but with far more collective intelligence, end up ruling us.

ergocoder 4y ago

I don't know why they say 10x developers don't exist. In my company, some people merge 600 PRs a year, and some only merge 50 PRs. When you look at the performance, there is an obvious correlation between good performance and PRs. They fix a lot of random stuffs in adjacent areas and finish their main projects. Of course, this correlation is not true 100% of the time.

EduardoRT 4y ago
It's so stupid if you dumb it down even further, it's so obvious that there are people that will be worth 10x more in every field, just compare the worst developer you know with the best developer you know, the difference it's probably way more than ten-fold; same thing with a doctor, scientist, mathematician, etc.

incomingpain 4y ago

>Development skills vary and can be improved. I don’t think anyone argues that point. But are people really 10x better at tasks than non-incompetent colleagues? Yes and in fact 10x is too small a number. 10x engineers is inaccurate to be sure. It's simple formula. Your productivity / your average team member's productivity. If your average team member accomplishes nothing or in some cases causes problems and doesnt solve any problems. You are dividing by 0 or a very very small decimal number. In my experience because of social media and such. Most people dont pay attention while at work. I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen coworkers sleeping in their cube. How many people doomscroll reddit or facebook while at work?Basically everyone. So who are the 10x engineers? The people who aren't wasting time. The people who are engaged and paying attention. The people who are actually working unlike most.

electric_dreams 4y ago