4 ms·

My question is ; if you somehow could level up all the other people on the team to the super productive person's level - how much more productive would the team

My question is ; if you somehow could level up all the other people on the team to the super productive person's level - how much more productive would the team have been? Clearly it would have been somewhat more productive but I think a lot of this "10x developer" stuff is kind of reductionist - the quality of the overall team being solely the total quality of each individual member. Sports teams are the obvious analogy here - with football/soccer you sometimes get these "team of the season" things where the best player in each position is chosen. One striker scored 50 goals for his team, another striker scored 48 goals somewhere else - wow, if they played together the team would have 98 goals. Except obviously not since there's a finite number of chances and the team is structured to play a certain way (often around their star player). And that's not taking into account ego/personality clashes which is a non-trivial concern with high performing people.

renox 4y ago
I think ego/personality clash are not related to performance. I once worked with a 'prima dona' in the team who couldn't stand when someone critised his (average at most) performance. You only associates both because it's 'easy' to resolve problems with high ego/low- average performance devs, you fire them.. But when it's an high performance dev, it's more complicated..
CM30 4y ago
It probably depends on the company and project. If it's a hugely ambitious one with tons of challenging tasks to work on, then everyone being '10x times better' would mean it'd speed along and get done in about a quarter of the time. For most projects/companies? I suspect you probably couldn't get much more efficient if everyone was significantly more skilled, and quickly realise how little meaningful work there is to do there. Given 10 super expert programmers the task of creating another CRUD app or client website and I suspect at least 9 of them would probably quit by the end of the month out of boredom.

renox 4y ago

I think ego/personality clash are not related to performance. I once worked with a 'prima dona' in the team who couldn't stand when someone critised his (average at most) performance. You only associates both because it's 'easy' to resolve problems with high ego/low- average performance devs, you fire them.. But when it's an high performance dev, it's more complicated..

CM30 4y ago

It probably depends on the company and project. If it's a hugely ambitious one with tons of challenging tasks to work on, then everyone being '10x times better' would mean it'd speed along and get done in about a quarter of the time. For most projects/companies? I suspect you probably couldn't get much more efficient if everyone was significantly more skilled, and quickly realise how little meaningful work there is to do there. Given 10 super expert programmers the task of creating another CRUD app or client website and I suspect at least 9 of them would probably quit by the end of the month out of boredom.