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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 a

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.

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.