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10x exist in most fields. In academia there are definitely people who are heads and shoulders above others, for example. Then it is also a matter of interpretat

10x exist in most fields. In academia there are definitely people who are heads and shoulders above others, for example. Then it is also a matter of interpretation, what is meant by somebody who is 10x: 1. There are people who are 10x better at working in one codebase simply because they have so much experience with it. 2. There are people who end up leading a great lab. The sum total of their circumstances end up making them 10x more productive than their colleagues in their field of research. 3. There are people who can be dropped into an unknown research/development environment and be productive 10x faster than others. I think people mostly mean 3. when they talk about the 10x programmer. Anyway, does any of this really matter? If you are a 10x programmer, then you should make sure you get compensated for it. And if you aren't, you really do not want to get confused for one as the pressure of expectations will make your life miserable. I personally believe most people reach their optimum lifestyle subconsciously. A 10x programmer gets there because (he (or she) is naturally talented) and he has enough interest, desire and willingness to commit his time to become 10x better. If you aren't a 10x you probably also do not really want to be a 10x, because you probably value spending your time elsewhere or just do not truly enjoy the stress that comes with such a role. Basically what I want to say with all of this is: 1. There are definitely some people who are heads and shoulders above others. 2. But in many cases a 10x is a 10x in their natural environment. If you remove them from their natural environment they won't replicate their success, even if their natural ability is also very much above average. We tend to attribute all the merit to the leader and forget all the people working under him. 3. You shouldn't concern yourself with how high you rank in this hierarchy. Do what you feel comfortable doing and enjoy life. You probably subconsciously chose the role that most accommodates your lifestyle, anyway. I think I might have veered a bit off-topic.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago
Academia is not "most fields". Most field is Farmer, business, lawyer, plumber etc.
- brushfoot 4y ago
  GP never said it was: > In academia there are definitely people who are heads and shoulders above others, for example [my emphasis]. GP was providing support for their claim that 10xs exist in most fields. Academia was just one example of a field (or "field of fields"). The same could be said of farming and plumbing.
soneca 4y ago
I do agree with your opinions and I’ve met 10x programmers who are also nice people. But I think there is resistence to the idea of 10x and a natural sympathy that 10x is a myth because of a few types of 10x - The one who is 10x at the expense of their colleagues (they run fast and break things and leave to others clean what is broken, which is part of the reason that they are fast). - The one who is, at most, 1.5x or 2x but think they are (and sell themselves to the leadership as) 10x and get a very disproportional part of the money, promotions, praise, notoriety. - The one who really is 10x, knows it, everyone that worked with knows it, but they are just obnoxious about it. They consider themselves not just a better programmer but a superior human being. This one at least is productive and can be dealt with good management. So when you have met those types, especially the first two types, it is natural to have sympathy to the idea that 10x is a myth. But, for me, it’s clear that they exist and some of them are nice people and great to work with, they are 10x in velocity and code quality, so they make your life easier as a programmer next to them.
- spacephysics 4y ago
  Fully agree. Will say that although the third type may be great at delivering value, they may have a negative effect on the team and either drive away talent from the team, bring down morale, or cause the only people to stay with the team to be less ideal (since some great team members may see the toxicity, and understandably avoid that job) That is to say, some at this type surely can be managed, but it may take a really good manager (and even that may not be enough), along with team mates who are not only good, but also able to deal with such a team member. Which in the end may negate the 10x productivity, or at the very least reduce it. I guess one alternative is having them in their own “team” basically reporting to a director but having no immediate team members
- treeman79 4y ago
  Severe ADHD, uncontrolled for 30 years until recently. I’ve been the 10x programmer several times in my career. Interesting positions that kept me hyper focused. Built out entire product lines, saved or made companies millions. I’ve been 1x or much lower on uninteresting projects, or ones where I couldn’t get management to deal with blockers. Some of these have been at same company. Just depended on the project.
Sebb767 4y ago
> 10x exist in most fields. In academia there are definitely people who are heads and shoulders above others, for example. I think this depends a bit on your viewpoint. When most people think of 10x developers, they think of ten times their theoretical maximum output, not their actual output. The highly productive people I met were good developers, but not leagues beyond in skill. They just had their work setup to not be bogged down too much by meetings, knew the application and had the ability to actually do productive work to the scale of something like 8-10h per day. If you compare that to your average developer, who will be somewhat impeded by management overhead, 'only' be reasonably skilled and max out at something like 4 fully productive hours a day (2 on Friday), it really seems like those guys can put out 10x the work.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Well, it might simply be "push the project architecture in right direction so whole team overall is efficient". It's also probably a lot of anecdotes, "this dev solved weird issue in a day where other dev was stuck for week and couldn't find it!". They might be 2x developer on normal day but happened to be this or that, debugged some hard bugs everyone else got stuck at and the people in project remembered those few good performances and assumed they do everything that much better
mc32 4y ago
Or maybe another way to look at productivity and effectiveness is that there are the ~1/10 performers and top performers at 1 x, of which in most fields there are very few, but there are lots of 1/3 … 1/10th performers.
worldsayshi 4y ago
In any field where there are multiple possible directions for optimization 10x can be in many different directions. Compare GRRM with Stephen King. Both are very skilled authors but one is releasing books like clockwork and the other has propensity for getting authors block. Is one of them a 10x author and the other not? I think the answer depends on your reading taste.
- thanatropism 4y ago
  I think that of all professions, even creative professions, best-selling fiction writers are the easiest to compare in terms of $$$. How does Saint-Exupery's Little Prince fare in total lifetime sales compared with Stephen King's entire output? (I don't know! But it's a question that can be asked). In comparison, the comparison of best-seller musicians suffers from how many times the economics of popular music has radically changed over a century. And music is already the product of many people even for something like "Joe Pass plays solo guitar inside his closet as recorded by a handheld potato". (He plays music composed by others! Also not really an example of pop music.)
  - CM30 4y ago
    Is money really a good indication of someone's skill as a writer? That's its own question, and I guess it depends on what you consider good or not. There are plenty of authors who become millionaires/billionaires because they knew what the market liked and how to sell themselves/their work, but many people would not consider them the pinnacle of their craft. It's undeniable that something like Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey is extremely successful, but whether that makes Stephanie Meyer and EL James better authors than Stephen King or George RR Martin is debatable at least. But I guess the question of successful/fast/highly compensated vs skilled is probably also true of progammers too. Is a 10x programmers also necessary a successful one career wise?
jvanderbot 4y ago
In my experience, there certainly exists a 10x gap between those who aren't very helpful and those who are extremely helpful. That is the crux of the research as I understand it anyway: You'll find a big distribution in talent, but a median producer is not 1/10 the best. I've found those who produce significantly faster do so by creating well justified shortcuts that do not sacrifice the end goals (but may run around the requirements a little.) That's exactly the story in TFA: Someone decided "I'm not going to satisfy this silly requirement of writing tests, I'm going to just auto-generate some tests, regardless of whether this has full coverage of all corner cases, because I bet everyone is just happier to move on." This is why I believe a 10x-er can be trained, by building a deep toolbox of solutions to pull from, learning to read the room when it comes to designs, and learning to recognize and take well-justified shortcuts whenever possible.
- greyman 4y ago
  We had one 10x developer in our team (it was a bigger project with about 70 developers). His output was 10x the average mainly because he had very (both) deep and broad domain knowledge, i.e. knowing largest part of our own code base. That will allows him to produce much more, since he doesn't need to investigate how something was done or how to integrate the new feature into the system. He was also quite hardworking, which also helps. Of course, if he would be put into a completely new project, he probably wouldn't be 10x, at least not the first few years there.
- Izkata 4y ago
  > You'll find a big distribution in talent, but a median producer is not 1/10 the best. That's also a misunderstanding: The original research that the "10x" label was based on was best-to-worst, not best-to-median. Also (not so much to you but eh may as well just dump it here): it was "in a given group of experienced programmers". Basically could be thought of as "within a given team". It never meant a single person was themselves always 10x or whatever.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    > That's also a misunderstanding Well yeah, that's what I'm saying, but thank you for bringing it front and center in a clearer way.
epups 4y ago
> You shouldn't concern yourself with how high you rank in this hierarchy. I find that many people commonly believe themselves to be a >1x programmer who is simply misunderstood, which is damaging. This leads to them thinking they deserve more, and therefore can make less effort to compensate this delta, or imagining that those above them who disagree with their own characterization must be idiots.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Every person believes oneself to be a >1x in everything (dancer, global policy thinker, lover, ...), that's normal and that's how our brains are wired.
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
An economics way to look at it would be to consider marginal output of the worker, ie how much value/profit/whatever_you_target the organization would have produced with the worker minus how much it would have produced without the worker.
antihero 4y ago
ADHD hyperfocus can definitely be a factor also.
- josephg 4y ago
  Yep. I have 10x weeks - sometimes months. Then I have weeks like this one where I do basically nothing. I think the total output is still quite high compared to other people, but I’ve spent most of my professional life torturing myself for being “lazy” because my work patterns don’t look like other people.
  - thanatropism 4y ago
    Ah, the times where I worked for a large org and could get away with these variations. Startups and consulting clients can't afford or don't care that you're having a bad couple of weeks.
  - antihero 4y ago
    Ha yes, when I was in my twenties I was known as the guy who’d get a week’s worth of work done in the one day I turned up…
Applejinx 4y ago
It matters if you're trying to do things. I'm something of a 10x designer who can program, a bit. As a result I've produced a working library of products easily 10x the size and scope of most competitors, within some very obvious constraints because I am NOT a 10x programmer, per se. My effectiveness is in coming up with the things to do, and why, and implementing them in such a way as to maximize their reach and usefulness. I'm currently working with a 10x programmer, whose capacity is astronomically beyond mine as far as programming is concerned, but who's simply a good designer, not a 10x designer. So his projects tend to be user-driven and expansive, and very useful and dependable, but rapidly feature-creeping because he's not really one to tell users 'no, you can't have that, it's not in line with the vision'. His 10x is in the ability to bring all such requests to fruition, for many parallel projects. We're collaborating on a thing and my overview/observation is this: when you're able to get the people working cooperatively AND trusting each others' 10X domains, it multiplies. I figure me and this guy combine to be a 100X, if and only if we consciously work towards maximizing that. The experiential thing about being that person in that situation is the EFFORTLESSNESS of it. It's really pretty mind-blowing. Requires good enough people skills to be able to observe, listen, and trust. But when you luck into that kind of combination, it feels totally Woz/Jobs. Stuff just unfolds, perhaps with a lot of enthusiastic work (I'll happily put in days, weeks, months of grind on things at my level that will facilitate the project) but it's important to understand that it's not 10X or 100X the effort or burden. Being in that 10X situation is great, and you should be able to be there in such a way that everybody's delighted and facilitated by what you're doing. If it's a burden on others or giving them a hard time, it's not the 10X/100X thing I've experienced. It's not a struggle. It's about when things just go great, seem to burst forth effortlessly.
tremon 4y ago
4. There are people who are so hyperfocused on delivering a feature that they produce 10x as much technical debt as a regular programmer. The resistance against that type of developer is probably from the rest of the team who get to clean up after them but get none of the recognition.
JohnBooty 4y ago
I think your 3 examples of "10x programmers" definitely exist. But, here's what's most typical in my experience: 4. A programmer who writes a bunch of code and delivers a bunch of features early in a project's history. Because management typically does not have the engineering chops to determine the actual quality/maintainability of the code being delivered, but does highly value rapid delivery, this process overwhelmingly selects for developers who are deliver sloppy but (mostly) working code at high velocity. Additionally, they are the only ones able to understand how the existing mess works, because they are the ones who created it. So everybody else works at a disadvantage. This further cements the belief that they are "10x" and they are rewarded with more and more greenfield work and they usually make a mess of that as well while management continues to think they're geniuses.
- lambdasquirrel 4y ago
  Well, to play devil's advocate, that's 10x in the context of finding product-market fit. And that really matters, whether "good" engineers want to believe it or not too. It's just that the kind of person who does that is also likely to be burned out, and have nothing else going for them in life, so they tend to become an asshole – leading to your assessment of things. I've seen 10x folks in the other 3 categories be total assholes too. I think the "debate" around 10x folks is a bit silly, and by hard-earned experience, I've learned to question the motivations of the folks who deny that such engineers exist. There is a whole other sort of politics going on, and, it doesn't address the core problem. My experience of 10x folks is more like: can you live with them, will they be a boost to the team overall, or will they use their 10x to bring down folks around them (consciously or subconsciously) so that they can appear to be more like 20x, or something petty like that. Some 10x folks use their 10x to put everyone else at a disadvantage, by forcing people to play their very specific sort of game (happens especially with strong specialists who are also decent generalists, i.e. T-shaped people). There are others who use their 10x to resist any changes, typically out of some seen-it-all cynicism (happens with the crowd who are really good at some codebase, or who are leaders of their lab, etc.). The damage caused is difficult to dislodge because it's based on context as much as skill, and learning the business context can take years, which most talented people won't have patience for – if the 10x even allows them to exist. Every sort of 10x has some dark pattern (alluding back to your experience), and for that reason, I think it's important for "good" people to not let whatever 10x they have get to their head, and to find other things in life that offers them non-attachment and perspective. It isn't necessarily a strong-people-be-assholes problem as much as a human nature problem. Left unchecked, 10x becomes self-defeating at a team or org level, and will make the 10x person miserable too (even if they don't know it).
matwood 4y ago
10x just throws people off, when it's really just much better 5x-10x-100x. Also, it's often hard for people to accept that someone is demonstrably better at the same job. I relate things to Jiu-Jitsu a lot, but here again it helps. I know where I stand in the gym at all times. It forces honesty with myself. There's nowhere for me to hide when another human lets me go from a position that if the circumstances were different they could kill or otherwise seriously harm me. There are people I beat, people who I rarely beat, then there are a couple people who are so good it's almost like we are playing a different sport. Do I jump through mental gymnastics to make myself feel better about the different sport people existing? No, I look at what they do and try to learn from them where I can while understanding I will likely never be that good. And that's ok.
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>when it's really just much better 5x-10x-100x. At seventeen Hussain went on forty-day self-imposed retreat known as a chilla, where a musician practices in isolation until a state is reached in which the music and musician become one. The removal of everyday distractions, combined with single-minded concentration on the practice allows the musician to attain a state of Samadhi or meditative absorption, where one enters into a deeper relationship with one’s own music, and comes in direct contact with the source of music itself. Visions and hallucinations are not uncommon, where one’s musical ancestors may appear and offer encouragement or criticism. What is certain is that the musician makes remarkable progress in his craft. Hussain recalls his first Chilla in Hart’s drumming “I saw things in the music that I had never seen before, new combinations, new patterns”. Six month’s later, against his father’s advice, Zakir was ready to do a second chilla. This time around, the visions were more intense, and Hussain had a premonition that he would soon go to America. Peter Lavezzoli in Peter Lavezzoli (24 April 2006). The Dawn of Indian Music in the West. Continuum. pp. 108–. ISBN 978-0-8264-1815-9., and this vision came true a year later and Hussain went to America and made a huge successful career for himself. From : https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zakir_Hussain_(musician) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zakir_Hussain_(musician) What most people don't get-- There are not only 100x professionals, it can also be very hard to understand just far ahead they are when it comes to putting in efforts at a scale normal people can't even imagine.
Yizahi 4y ago
I think there are two categories of IT engineers (to include not only programmers). There are 2x engineers, and there are 10x engineers. 2x engineer is that guy to who you will go when you have exhausted all other simpler options (or go immediately, when you learn to optimize solutions), who will fix or guide you on a level others can't match. And he is probably 2 times more productive with his tasks than median level, or can be, depending on his time commitment. And I think there really can't be more productivity increases above these 2x times. Maybe you can find some unicorns, top of top, who are 3x times more productive, but that's about it. 10x engineer on the other hand is the one who is most vocal about any related or unrelated issues to him, who goes to every smoking break, to every party, to every seminar and tech talk and himself gives talks. He in known across the teams and even projects and the first to be promoted, usually along leadership track. He can also be 2x engineer in fact, but the rest of the "Exes" comes purely from self advertisement.
dkarl 4y ago
> I personally believe most people reach their optimum lifestyle subconsciously I somewhat agree with this. I think as people are exposed to different roles and tasks over time, they will take to some more easily or enthusiastically than others, and the skills they build will result in them doing more of that kind of work in the future. What I find fascinating, however, is that people arrive at things subconsciously in two very different ways. Either it's something they enjoyed at every step along the way, or it was painful at first, but they didn't feel like they had a choice, and eventually they reached a level of proficiency where they enjoyed it and pursued it willingly. These are both thoroughly haphazard ways of choosing what to pursue in life, passively following the path of least resistance like water flowing downhill through whatever terrain happens to be in front of it. But you can intentionally pursue things that life doesn't put in front of you. One thing people do consciously rather than subconsciously is look at something they find cool and think, "Wow, that looks amazing. I want to learn how to do that." And they don't concern themselves with the fact that it isn't fun at first and nobody is forcing them to do it. They motivate themselves with the end goal. That takes active, conscious effort. For example, the passive way some people get into web development is that they make a really simple web page with an h1 element containing their name and think, "Neat." Immediate gratification. They change the color. "Cool!" More immediate gratification. And they get passively swept into learning web development. But there are other people who first get excited looking at a really beautifully designed site on the web. They think, "Wow, that is amazing. I want to be able to do that." So they make a simple web page with an h1 element containing their name, and they think, "This is shit. This feels bad to look at, and I feel bad that I made it." But they struggle through the learning process because they keep the end goal in mind. They keep thinking about how amazing it will be to make something great.
- pitsnatch 4y ago
  Beautifully put! I just realized I've been on both sides of that. Younger me tended to be the first case you described. Older me seems to tend towards the second case. Perhaps because I am highly conscious of my time now and don't give myself much time to play.
deleted 4y ago
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YetAnotherNick 4y ago

Academia is not "most fields". Most field is Farmer, business, lawyer, plumber etc.

brushfoot 4y ago
GP never said it was: > In academia there are definitely people who are heads and shoulders above others, for example [my emphasis]. GP was providing support for their claim that 10xs exist in most fields. Academia was just one example of a field (or "field of fields"). The same could be said of farming and plumbing.

soneca 4y ago

I do agree with your opinions and I’ve met 10x programmers who are also nice people. But I think there is resistence to the idea of 10x and a natural sympathy that 10x is a myth because of a few types of 10x - The one who is 10x at the expense of their colleagues (they run fast and break things and leave to others clean what is broken, which is part of the reason that they are fast). - The one who is, at most, 1.5x or 2x but think they are (and sell themselves to the leadership as) 10x and get a very disproportional part of the money, promotions, praise, notoriety. - The one who really is 10x, knows it, everyone that worked with knows it, but they are just obnoxious about it. They consider themselves not just a better programmer but a superior human being. This one at least is productive and can be dealt with good management. So when you have met those types, especially the first two types, it is natural to have sympathy to the idea that 10x is a myth. But, for me, it’s clear that they exist and some of them are nice people and great to work with, they are 10x in velocity and code quality, so they make your life easier as a programmer next to them.

spacephysics 4y ago
Fully agree. Will say that although the third type may be great at delivering value, they may have a negative effect on the team and either drive away talent from the team, bring down morale, or cause the only people to stay with the team to be less ideal (since some great team members may see the toxicity, and understandably avoid that job) That is to say, some at this type surely can be managed, but it may take a really good manager (and even that may not be enough), along with team mates who are not only good, but also able to deal with such a team member. Which in the end may negate the 10x productivity, or at the very least reduce it. I guess one alternative is having them in their own “team” basically reporting to a director but having no immediate team members
treeman79 4y ago
Severe ADHD, uncontrolled for 30 years until recently. I’ve been the 10x programmer several times in my career. Interesting positions that kept me hyper focused. Built out entire product lines, saved or made companies millions. I’ve been 1x or much lower on uninteresting projects, or ones where I couldn’t get management to deal with blockers. Some of these have been at same company. Just depended on the project.

Sebb767 4y ago

> 10x exist in most fields. In academia there are definitely people who are heads and shoulders above others, for example. I think this depends a bit on your viewpoint. When most people think of 10x developers, they think of ten times their theoretical maximum output, not their actual output. The highly productive people I met were good developers, but not leagues beyond in skill. They just had their work setup to not be bogged down too much by meetings, knew the application and had the ability to actually do productive work to the scale of something like 8-10h per day. If you compare that to your average developer, who will be somewhat impeded by management overhead, 'only' be reasonably skilled and max out at something like 4 fully productive hours a day (2 on Friday), it really seems like those guys can put out 10x the work.

ilyt 4y ago
Well, it might simply be "push the project architecture in right direction so whole team overall is efficient". It's also probably a lot of anecdotes, "this dev solved weird issue in a day where other dev was stuck for week and couldn't find it!". They might be 2x developer on normal day but happened to be this or that, debugged some hard bugs everyone else got stuck at and the people in project remembered those few good performances and assumed they do everything that much better

mc32 4y ago

Or maybe another way to look at productivity and effectiveness is that there are the ~1/10 performers and top performers at 1 x, of which in most fields there are very few, but there are lots of 1/3 … 1/10th performers.

worldsayshi 4y ago

In any field where there are multiple possible directions for optimization 10x can be in many different directions. Compare GRRM with Stephen King. Both are very skilled authors but one is releasing books like clockwork and the other has propensity for getting authors block. Is one of them a 10x author and the other not? I think the answer depends on your reading taste.

thanatropism 4y ago
I think that of all professions, even creative professions, best-selling fiction writers are the easiest to compare in terms of $$$. How does Saint-Exupery's Little Prince fare in total lifetime sales compared with Stephen King's entire output? (I don't know! But it's a question that can be asked). In comparison, the comparison of best-seller musicians suffers from how many times the economics of popular music has radically changed over a century. And music is already the product of many people even for something like "Joe Pass plays solo guitar inside his closet as recorded by a handheld potato". (He plays music composed by others! Also not really an example of pop music.)
- CM30 4y ago
  Is money really a good indication of someone's skill as a writer? That's its own question, and I guess it depends on what you consider good or not. There are plenty of authors who become millionaires/billionaires because they knew what the market liked and how to sell themselves/their work, but many people would not consider them the pinnacle of their craft. It's undeniable that something like Twilight or 50 Shades of Grey is extremely successful, but whether that makes Stephanie Meyer and EL James better authors than Stephen King or George RR Martin is debatable at least. But I guess the question of successful/fast/highly compensated vs skilled is probably also true of progammers too. Is a 10x programmers also necessary a successful one career wise?

jvanderbot 4y ago

In my experience, there certainly exists a 10x gap between those who aren't very helpful and those who are extremely helpful. That is the crux of the research as I understand it anyway: You'll find a big distribution in talent, but a median producer is not 1/10 the best. I've found those who produce significantly faster do so by creating well justified shortcuts that do not sacrifice the end goals (but may run around the requirements a little.) That's exactly the story in TFA: Someone decided "I'm not going to satisfy this silly requirement of writing tests, I'm going to just auto-generate some tests, regardless of whether this has full coverage of all corner cases, because I bet everyone is just happier to move on." This is why I believe a 10x-er can be trained, by building a deep toolbox of solutions to pull from, learning to read the room when it comes to designs, and learning to recognize and take well-justified shortcuts whenever possible.

greyman 4y ago
We had one 10x developer in our team (it was a bigger project with about 70 developers). His output was 10x the average mainly because he had very (both) deep and broad domain knowledge, i.e. knowing largest part of our own code base. That will allows him to produce much more, since he doesn't need to investigate how something was done or how to integrate the new feature into the system. He was also quite hardworking, which also helps. Of course, if he would be put into a completely new project, he probably wouldn't be 10x, at least not the first few years there.
Izkata 4y ago
> You'll find a big distribution in talent, but a median producer is not 1/10 the best. That's also a misunderstanding: The original research that the "10x" label was based on was best-to-worst, not best-to-median. Also (not so much to you but eh may as well just dump it here): it was "in a given group of experienced programmers". Basically could be thought of as "within a given team". It never meant a single person was themselves always 10x or whatever.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  > That's also a misunderstanding Well yeah, that's what I'm saying, but thank you for bringing it front and center in a clearer way.

epups 4y ago

> You shouldn't concern yourself with how high you rank in this hierarchy. I find that many people commonly believe themselves to be a >1x programmer who is simply misunderstood, which is damaging. This leads to them thinking they deserve more, and therefore can make less effort to compensate this delta, or imagining that those above them who disagree with their own characterization must be idiots.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Every person believes oneself to be a >1x in everything (dancer, global policy thinker, lover, ...), that's normal and that's how our brains are wired.

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

An economics way to look at it would be to consider marginal output of the worker, ie how much value/profit/whatever_you_target the organization would have produced with the worker minus how much it would have produced without the worker.

antihero 4y ago

ADHD hyperfocus can definitely be a factor also.

josephg 4y ago
Yep. I have 10x weeks - sometimes months. Then I have weeks like this one where I do basically nothing. I think the total output is still quite high compared to other people, but I’ve spent most of my professional life torturing myself for being “lazy” because my work patterns don’t look like other people.
- thanatropism 4y ago
  Ah, the times where I worked for a large org and could get away with these variations. Startups and consulting clients can't afford or don't care that you're having a bad couple of weeks.
- antihero 4y ago
  Ha yes, when I was in my twenties I was known as the guy who’d get a week’s worth of work done in the one day I turned up…

Applejinx 4y ago

It matters if you're trying to do things. I'm something of a 10x designer who can program, a bit. As a result I've produced a working library of products easily 10x the size and scope of most competitors, within some very obvious constraints because I am NOT a 10x programmer, per se. My effectiveness is in coming up with the things to do, and why, and implementing them in such a way as to maximize their reach and usefulness. I'm currently working with a 10x programmer, whose capacity is astronomically beyond mine as far as programming is concerned, but who's simply a good designer, not a 10x designer. So his projects tend to be user-driven and expansive, and very useful and dependable, but rapidly feature-creeping because he's not really one to tell users 'no, you can't have that, it's not in line with the vision'. His 10x is in the ability to bring all such requests to fruition, for many parallel projects. We're collaborating on a thing and my overview/observation is this: when you're able to get the people working cooperatively AND trusting each others' 10X domains, it multiplies. I figure me and this guy combine to be a 100X, if and only if we consciously work towards maximizing that. The experiential thing about being that person in that situation is the EFFORTLESSNESS of it. It's really pretty mind-blowing. Requires good enough people skills to be able to observe, listen, and trust. But when you luck into that kind of combination, it feels totally Woz/Jobs. Stuff just unfolds, perhaps with a lot of enthusiastic work (I'll happily put in days, weeks, months of grind on things at my level that will facilitate the project) but it's important to understand that it's not 10X or 100X the effort or burden. Being in that 10X situation is great, and you should be able to be there in such a way that everybody's delighted and facilitated by what you're doing. If it's a burden on others or giving them a hard time, it's not the 10X/100X thing I've experienced. It's not a struggle. It's about when things just go great, seem to burst forth effortlessly.

tremon 4y ago

4. There are people who are so hyperfocused on delivering a feature that they produce 10x as much technical debt as a regular programmer. The resistance against that type of developer is probably from the rest of the team who get to clean up after them but get none of the recognition.

JohnBooty 4y ago

I think your 3 examples of "10x programmers" definitely exist. But, here's what's most typical in my experience: 4. A programmer who writes a bunch of code and delivers a bunch of features early in a project's history. Because management typically does not have the engineering chops to determine the actual quality/maintainability of the code being delivered, but does highly value rapid delivery, this process overwhelmingly selects for developers who are deliver sloppy but (mostly) working code at high velocity. Additionally, they are the only ones able to understand how the existing mess works, because they are the ones who created it. So everybody else works at a disadvantage. This further cements the belief that they are "10x" and they are rewarded with more and more greenfield work and they usually make a mess of that as well while management continues to think they're geniuses.

lambdasquirrel 4y ago
Well, to play devil's advocate, that's 10x in the context of finding product-market fit. And that really matters, whether "good" engineers want to believe it or not too. It's just that the kind of person who does that is also likely to be burned out, and have nothing else going for them in life, so they tend to become an asshole – leading to your assessment of things. I've seen 10x folks in the other 3 categories be total assholes too. I think the "debate" around 10x folks is a bit silly, and by hard-earned experience, I've learned to question the motivations of the folks who deny that such engineers exist. There is a whole other sort of politics going on, and, it doesn't address the core problem. My experience of 10x folks is more like: can you live with them, will they be a boost to the team overall, or will they use their 10x to bring down folks around them (consciously or subconsciously) so that they can appear to be more like 20x, or something petty like that. Some 10x folks use their 10x to put everyone else at a disadvantage, by forcing people to play their very specific sort of game (happens especially with strong specialists who are also decent generalists, i.e. T-shaped people). There are others who use their 10x to resist any changes, typically out of some seen-it-all cynicism (happens with the crowd who are really good at some codebase, or who are leaders of their lab, etc.). The damage caused is difficult to dislodge because it's based on context as much as skill, and learning the business context can take years, which most talented people won't have patience for – if the 10x even allows them to exist. Every sort of 10x has some dark pattern (alluding back to your experience), and for that reason, I think it's important for "good" people to not let whatever 10x they have get to their head, and to find other things in life that offers them non-attachment and perspective. It isn't necessarily a strong-people-be-assholes problem as much as a human nature problem. Left unchecked, 10x becomes self-defeating at a team or org level, and will make the 10x person miserable too (even if they don't know it).

matwood 4y ago

10x just throws people off, when it's really just much better 5x-10x-100x. Also, it's often hard for people to accept that someone is demonstrably better at the same job. I relate things to Jiu-Jitsu a lot, but here again it helps. I know where I stand in the gym at all times. It forces honesty with myself. There's nowhere for me to hide when another human lets me go from a position that if the circumstances were different they could kill or otherwise seriously harm me. There are people I beat, people who I rarely beat, then there are a couple people who are so good it's almost like we are playing a different sport. Do I jump through mental gymnastics to make myself feel better about the different sport people existing? No, I look at what they do and try to learn from them where I can while understanding I will likely never be that good. And that's ok.

kamaal 4y ago
>>when it's really just much better 5x-10x-100x. At seventeen Hussain went on forty-day self-imposed retreat known as a chilla, where a musician practices in isolation until a state is reached in which the music and musician become one. The removal of everyday distractions, combined with single-minded concentration on the practice allows the musician to attain a state of Samadhi or meditative absorption, where one enters into a deeper relationship with one’s own music, and comes in direct contact with the source of music itself. Visions and hallucinations are not uncommon, where one’s musical ancestors may appear and offer encouragement or criticism. What is certain is that the musician makes remarkable progress in his craft. Hussain recalls his first Chilla in Hart’s drumming “I saw things in the music that I had never seen before, new combinations, new patterns”. Six month’s later, against his father’s advice, Zakir was ready to do a second chilla. This time around, the visions were more intense, and Hussain had a premonition that he would soon go to America. Peter Lavezzoli in Peter Lavezzoli (24 April 2006). The Dawn of Indian Music in the West. Continuum. pp. 108–. ISBN 978-0-8264-1815-9., and this vision came true a year later and Hussain went to America and made a huge successful career for himself. From : https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zakir_Hussain_(musician) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zakir_Hussain_(musician) What most people don't get-- There are not only 100x professionals, it can also be very hard to understand just far ahead they are when it comes to putting in efforts at a scale normal people can't even imagine.

Yizahi 4y ago

I think there are two categories of IT engineers (to include not only programmers). There are 2x engineers, and there are 10x engineers. 2x engineer is that guy to who you will go when you have exhausted all other simpler options (or go immediately, when you learn to optimize solutions), who will fix or guide you on a level others can't match. And he is probably 2 times more productive with his tasks than median level, or can be, depending on his time commitment. And I think there really can't be more productivity increases above these 2x times. Maybe you can find some unicorns, top of top, who are 3x times more productive, but that's about it. 10x engineer on the other hand is the one who is most vocal about any related or unrelated issues to him, who goes to every smoking break, to every party, to every seminar and tech talk and himself gives talks. He in known across the teams and even projects and the first to be promoted, usually along leadership track. He can also be 2x engineer in fact, but the rest of the "Exes" comes purely from self advertisement.

dkarl 4y ago

> I personally believe most people reach their optimum lifestyle subconsciously I somewhat agree with this. I think as people are exposed to different roles and tasks over time, they will take to some more easily or enthusiastically than others, and the skills they build will result in them doing more of that kind of work in the future. What I find fascinating, however, is that people arrive at things subconsciously in two very different ways. Either it's something they enjoyed at every step along the way, or it was painful at first, but they didn't feel like they had a choice, and eventually they reached a level of proficiency where they enjoyed it and pursued it willingly. These are both thoroughly haphazard ways of choosing what to pursue in life, passively following the path of least resistance like water flowing downhill through whatever terrain happens to be in front of it. But you can intentionally pursue things that life doesn't put in front of you. One thing people do consciously rather than subconsciously is look at something they find cool and think, "Wow, that looks amazing. I want to learn how to do that." And they don't concern themselves with the fact that it isn't fun at first and nobody is forcing them to do it. They motivate themselves with the end goal. That takes active, conscious effort. For example, the passive way some people get into web development is that they make a really simple web page with an h1 element containing their name and think, "Neat." Immediate gratification. They change the color. "Cool!" More immediate gratification. And they get passively swept into learning web development. But there are other people who first get excited looking at a really beautifully designed site on the web. They think, "Wow, that is amazing. I want to be able to do that." So they make a simple web page with an h1 element containing their name, and they think, "This is shit. This feels bad to look at, and I feel bad that I made it." But they struggle through the learning process because they keep the end goal in mind. They keep thinking about how amazing it will be to make something great.

pitsnatch 4y ago
Beautifully put! I just realized I've been on both sides of that. Younger me tended to be the first case you described. Older me seems to tend towards the second case. Perhaps because I am highly conscious of my time now and don't give myself much time to play.

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