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So does anyone else agree that there are actually 10x (or more) developers? This is a pretty good example of how one works.

stocknoob 4y ago
It’s amusing that people even question the existence of 10x developers. What fraction of devs could even complete this, let alone in merely 10x the time?
- viraptor 4y ago
  The fraction of devs that regularly deal with databases and parsing. There are no 10x devs. There are devs with long experience in a specific category. The 10x idea is kind of stupid in terms of companies looking for them - it just means "we want people successfully trained somewhere else".
  - subroutine 4y ago
    I agree there are probably no 10x devs. This person took 7 days to (almost) complete this task (which they cherry picked for their self), suggesting the average 1x dev with experience in this domain would take 70 days. I think it would be more reasonable to call someone a 3 -sigma dev (someone 3 standard deviations above the mean. These would exist because that's how stats work)
    - rcxdude 4y ago
      It's worth pointing out that in the origin of the "10x developer" term, it's relative to the worst performing devs, not the average. Also, you're not guaranteed to have an example 3 standard deviations above the mean. It strongly depends on your distribution and sample size.
      - subroutine 4y ago
        I think the prevailing current definition is wrt. the average dev. The worst dev could be arbitrarily bad (suggesting the average dev could also be 10x). You're right about the sufficient sample size.
    - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
      I've always read 10x as an order of magnitude better, not necessarily 10x faster. 3 sigma is probably better terminology though.
      - subroutine 4y ago
        Isn't, say, 10 days an order of magnitude faster (better) than 100 days?
        ComputerGuru 4y ago
        It’s just one example of being 10x better but hardly the only one or the most realistic.
        subroutine 4y ago
        But probably the least subjective, and yeah, my position is that 10x is unrealistic.
        ComputerGuru 4y ago
        It may be the least subjective but it’s also the least technically/physically probable even if someone were a 10x developer. The gambit is that a mediocre programmer would take 10x as long to write the same code as the hypothetical 10x dev. But that’s not what a mediocre or even average dev does: they solve the problem in an entirely different (and, for purposes of this argument, less optimal) manner in some spam of time that may or may not be longer than a qualified hacker or a theoretical 10x dev. Almost all CS problems have multiple solutions, so you’re not likely to find one where there is only one solution and it takes one guy x and the other guy 10x as long.
        subroutine 4y ago
        Fair. I get your point. My only contention is of the magnitude - imo someone 10 times better than the average developer is a unicorn. But the term gets thrown around any time someone is 'just' really good; they wrote fairly optimal code, quickly. However, to your point, there may be an argument to be made that people who have made a huge impact on the CS landscape are 10x-ers (regardless of efficiency). Is Linus a 10x-er?
- cowmoo728 4y ago
  It's like questioning the existence of 10x NBA players or 10x chess players. The top super GMs are basically 10x better than most other GMs, who are themselves 10x better than most IMs. It seems strange that programming would be one of the fields that doesn't have a similar distribution of skill. I think the actual pushback of the 10x programmer idea is that it's more often used to bully regular programmers into working longer hours, rather than actually identifying top performing programmers.
  - sophacles 4y ago
    There's also the part where "developer" is more akin to "athlete" than "nba player". There's lots of different types of developer, just like there's lots of different types of athlete. A 10x NBA player will certainly not be a 10x Olympic Swimmer also, more likely .1X. Part of the problem is 10x developer gets talked about like they are going to be 10x athlete at NBA and Swimming and Golf and, and, and... that's what doesn't exist.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > What fraction of devs could even complete this Like 25%? But that’s really only because of the influx of people doing it for money. If you’d asked me the same thing 15 years ago I’d have said 80%.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I used to question their existence but that was before I met a couple. I think it's just that they are quite rare, so a lot of people haven't met them. If you also don't follow specific developers online then you might not notice any. Here are a few I've seen for which 10x is probably an underestimate! * David Tonlay and Alex Crighton - feels like they've written half the Rust ecosystem between them. * Eric Traut (Pyright author) - seriously go and check out Pyright's bug tracker. It's insane.
sangnoir 4y ago
10x developers exist, but their prevalence is greatly overstated. Also, churning out code at 10x doesn't make one a 10x developer (this could even hamper everyone else). I also propose that moniker be banned from being self-applied, and is in fact, a smell test: if you encounter a colleague calling themselves a 10x developer, start interviewing immediately. No good will come out of that.
- Jochim 4y ago
  My last boss was a 10x developer. Fantastically smart guy, socially awkward but nice, really looked out for his team but an absolute nightmare to work with technically. The majority of the team couldn't understand his code. We'd have newly hired senior developers just leave rather than deal with it. He'd rolled his own code generator for our data model that did everything from model generation to the web controllers. The result was that while he could pump out work quickly, what would've otherwise been a quick fix for a graduate developer now required a deep understanding of a complex system. This had the effect of turning what would have otherwise been a team of 1-2x developers into a team of 0.2-0.5x devs with a retention problem.
  - tempxyz 4y ago
    How is he 10x if no one understands his code? An expert at quick and dirty?
    - wolf550e 4y ago
      Imagine that instead of developing an app in a popular programming language, someone implements an idiosyncratic domain specific language suitable for the kind of app they need to build, and then builds the app using that. The result would work and maybe even let them be very productive churning out more features of the kind that were envisioned when the DSL was developed. If they need to extend or fix the DSL, as the original author, they can. Someone else will need to learn the DSL before they can do any work on the app.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
moritonal 4y ago
This is kind of an unhealthy attitude? @jamii seems super talented, but his bio says "in the past I've built database engines, query planners, compilers, developer tools and interfaces for [a...] myriad [of] consulting and personal research projects.", along with his repo's being related to SQL parers, or literal text-editors working purely on string manipulation. He is also sponsored to spent 100% of his time doing exactly this. What I mean that he is almost definitely a 10x dev at writing SQL parsers. But ask him to write a shader that renders a neat waterbed material and he'd be likely a 0.8x dev? The overlap between experience and context is key.
- spullara 4y ago
  When people say they don't exist they mean that they don't exist generally not just when testing someone on a new domain.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    I don't know anyone that would say that 10x developers don't exist at all. It's too easy to bring up someone like John Carmack or many foundational people in computer science that invented algorithms us layfolk could never imagine. My experience with the phrase is people mean finding a "diamond in the rough" who can code circles around anyone else. It's not about finding a Norvig or Carmack, it's about finding a fresh graduate that you can stick on a problem and they will be bountifully productive. It's basically a manager's wet dream: extremely productive but cheap. In my experience real 10x people appear to be the opposite: seemingly slow but incredibly expensive. Everyone I actually consider 10x makes millions. And of those that are friends, they didn't really reach that 10x stage until their 30s or 40s.
- blowski 4y ago
  I agree that I think this can be an unhealthy attitude. A lot of us are working on projects where the biggest challenge is convincing the Product Manager to provide more than one sentence in the brief. That said, I can't think of any technical domain where I could do this, even if provided with all the tests up front.
xhrpost 4y ago
Of course it's impressive but this isn't the sort of work the average dev ends up doing day to day. We spend our time digging into dependencies (this had zero) both internal and external, interfacing with stakeholders and looking up business logic for a change. All those async tasks ultimately add up to significant headwinds even for the best "10x" dev.
karaterobot 4y ago
> are actually 10x (or more) To me, the more likely explanation is that this guy is an excellent developer, working on a problem he was suited to, and that's about all you can say. He came up with good strategies and insights here, and worked hard, and did a lot of other stuff right. But the idea of a generically 10x developer is a cartoonish oversimplification of how the world works.
cztomsik 4y ago
I think the most important thing is "wanting to be faster/10x" (from the author's personal blog BTW) https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/moving-faster/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/moving-faster/ Also, it's good if language doesn't stand in your way.

stocknoob 4y ago

It’s amusing that people even question the existence of 10x developers. What fraction of devs could even complete this, let alone in merely 10x the time?

viraptor 4y ago
The fraction of devs that regularly deal with databases and parsing. There are no 10x devs. There are devs with long experience in a specific category. The 10x idea is kind of stupid in terms of companies looking for them - it just means "we want people successfully trained somewhere else".
- subroutine 4y ago
  I agree there are probably no 10x devs. This person took 7 days to (almost) complete this task (which they cherry picked for their self), suggesting the average 1x dev with experience in this domain would take 70 days. I think it would be more reasonable to call someone a 3 -sigma dev (someone 3 standard deviations above the mean. These would exist because that's how stats work)
  - rcxdude 4y ago
    It's worth pointing out that in the origin of the "10x developer" term, it's relative to the worst performing devs, not the average. Also, you're not guaranteed to have an example 3 standard deviations above the mean. It strongly depends on your distribution and sample size.
    - subroutine 4y ago
      I think the prevailing current definition is wrt. the average dev. The worst dev could be arbitrarily bad (suggesting the average dev could also be 10x). You're right about the sufficient sample size.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    I've always read 10x as an order of magnitude better, not necessarily 10x faster. 3 sigma is probably better terminology though.
    - subroutine 4y ago
      Isn't, say, 10 days an order of magnitude faster (better) than 100 days?
      - ComputerGuru 4y ago
        It’s just one example of being 10x better but hardly the only one or the most realistic.
        subroutine 4y ago
        But probably the least subjective, and yeah, my position is that 10x is unrealistic.
        ComputerGuru 4y ago
        It may be the least subjective but it’s also the least technically/physically probable even if someone were a 10x developer. The gambit is that a mediocre programmer would take 10x as long to write the same code as the hypothetical 10x dev. But that’s not what a mediocre or even average dev does: they solve the problem in an entirely different (and, for purposes of this argument, less optimal) manner in some spam of time that may or may not be longer than a qualified hacker or a theoretical 10x dev. Almost all CS problems have multiple solutions, so you’re not likely to find one where there is only one solution and it takes one guy x and the other guy 10x as long.
        subroutine 4y ago
        Fair. I get your point. My only contention is of the magnitude - imo someone 10 times better than the average developer is a unicorn. But the term gets thrown around any time someone is 'just' really good; they wrote fairly optimal code, quickly. However, to your point, there may be an argument to be made that people who have made a huge impact on the CS landscape are 10x-ers (regardless of efficiency). Is Linus a 10x-er?
cowmoo728 4y ago
It's like questioning the existence of 10x NBA players or 10x chess players. The top super GMs are basically 10x better than most other GMs, who are themselves 10x better than most IMs. It seems strange that programming would be one of the fields that doesn't have a similar distribution of skill. I think the actual pushback of the 10x programmer idea is that it's more often used to bully regular programmers into working longer hours, rather than actually identifying top performing programmers.
- sophacles 4y ago
  There's also the part where "developer" is more akin to "athlete" than "nba player". There's lots of different types of developer, just like there's lots of different types of athlete. A 10x NBA player will certainly not be a 10x Olympic Swimmer also, more likely .1X. Part of the problem is 10x developer gets talked about like they are going to be 10x athlete at NBA and Swimming and Golf and, and, and... that's what doesn't exist.
Aeolun 4y ago
> What fraction of devs could even complete this Like 25%? But that’s really only because of the influx of people doing it for money. If you’d asked me the same thing 15 years ago I’d have said 80%.
IshKebab 4y ago
I used to question their existence but that was before I met a couple. I think it's just that they are quite rare, so a lot of people haven't met them. If you also don't follow specific developers online then you might not notice any. Here are a few I've seen for which 10x is probably an underestimate! * David Tonlay and Alex Crighton - feels like they've written half the Rust ecosystem between them. * Eric Traut (Pyright author) - seriously go and check out Pyright's bug tracker. It's insane.

sangnoir 4y ago

10x developers exist, but their prevalence is greatly overstated. Also, churning out code at 10x doesn't make one a 10x developer (this could even hamper everyone else). I also propose that moniker be banned from being self-applied, and is in fact, a smell test: if you encounter a colleague calling themselves a 10x developer, start interviewing immediately. No good will come out of that.

Jochim 4y ago
My last boss was a 10x developer. Fantastically smart guy, socially awkward but nice, really looked out for his team but an absolute nightmare to work with technically. The majority of the team couldn't understand his code. We'd have newly hired senior developers just leave rather than deal with it. He'd rolled his own code generator for our data model that did everything from model generation to the web controllers. The result was that while he could pump out work quickly, what would've otherwise been a quick fix for a graduate developer now required a deep understanding of a complex system. This had the effect of turning what would have otherwise been a team of 1-2x developers into a team of 0.2-0.5x devs with a retention problem.
- tempxyz 4y ago
  How is he 10x if no one understands his code? An expert at quick and dirty?
  - wolf550e 4y ago
    Imagine that instead of developing an app in a popular programming language, someone implements an idiosyncratic domain specific language suitable for the kind of app they need to build, and then builds the app using that. The result would work and maybe even let them be very productive churning out more features of the kind that were envisioned when the DSL was developed. If they need to extend or fix the DSL, as the original author, they can. Someone else will need to learn the DSL before they can do any work on the app.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

moritonal 4y ago

This is kind of an unhealthy attitude? @jamii seems super talented, but his bio says "in the past I've built database engines, query planners, compilers, developer tools and interfaces for [a...] myriad [of] consulting and personal research projects.", along with his repo's being related to SQL parers, or literal text-editors working purely on string manipulation. He is also sponsored to spent 100% of his time doing exactly this. What I mean that he is almost definitely a 10x dev at writing SQL parsers. But ask him to write a shader that renders a neat waterbed material and he'd be likely a 0.8x dev? The overlap between experience and context is key.

spullara 4y ago
When people say they don't exist they mean that they don't exist generally not just when testing someone on a new domain.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  I don't know anyone that would say that 10x developers don't exist at all. It's too easy to bring up someone like John Carmack or many foundational people in computer science that invented algorithms us layfolk could never imagine. My experience with the phrase is people mean finding a "diamond in the rough" who can code circles around anyone else. It's not about finding a Norvig or Carmack, it's about finding a fresh graduate that you can stick on a problem and they will be bountifully productive. It's basically a manager's wet dream: extremely productive but cheap. In my experience real 10x people appear to be the opposite: seemingly slow but incredibly expensive. Everyone I actually consider 10x makes millions. And of those that are friends, they didn't really reach that 10x stage until their 30s or 40s.
blowski 4y ago
I agree that I think this can be an unhealthy attitude. A lot of us are working on projects where the biggest challenge is convincing the Product Manager to provide more than one sentence in the brief. That said, I can't think of any technical domain where I could do this, even if provided with all the tests up front.

xhrpost 4y ago

Of course it's impressive but this isn't the sort of work the average dev ends up doing day to day. We spend our time digging into dependencies (this had zero) both internal and external, interfacing with stakeholders and looking up business logic for a change. All those async tasks ultimately add up to significant headwinds even for the best "10x" dev.

karaterobot 4y ago

> are actually 10x (or more) To me, the more likely explanation is that this guy is an excellent developer, working on a problem he was suited to, and that's about all you can say. He came up with good strategies and insights here, and worked hard, and did a lot of other stuff right. But the idea of a generically 10x developer is a cartoonish oversimplification of how the world works.

cztomsik 4y ago

I think the most important thing is "wanting to be faster/10x" (from the author's personal blog BTW) https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/moving-faster/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/moving-faster/ Also, it's good if language doesn't stand in your way.