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He's not a 10x dev. … He shows up every day and burns his way down the issue list I thought that’s what 10x’ers do. What else could anyone call them 10x for? C

by wruza 3y ago

He's not a 10x dev. … He shows up every day and burns his way down the issue list I thought that’s what 10x’ers do. What else could anyone call them 10x for? Complaining all day and rewriting twice a month?

tshaddox 3y ago
> What else could anyone call them 10x for? Developing truly innovative solutions to hard problems? Doing the hard stuff like documenting code and writing automated tests? Fixing bugs that no one else could? Proactively identifying and resolving software reliability and performance issues?
phanimahesh 3y ago
Consistency was never a part of 10x developer definition as I understood it. That label is more often than not applied to "talent", however nebulous it is defined. Consistency is very underrated and hard to develop a habit for.
boxed 3y ago
A 10x dev can realize you're solving the wrong problem.
kragen 3y ago
in the original experiment (sackman, erickson, and grant) they were able to successfully solve programming-contest-style problems in a tenth of the time that other people required. so maybe ten hours instead of 100 hours. this should not surprise anyone who's worked on a programming team or who has looked at code they wrote ten or twenty years previously. the actual ratios were from 5:1 to 28:1, but that was an understatement, because some of the programmers couldn't solve the problem at all in the allotted time, if I understand correctly in some cases because they decided to solve it in assembly language. sackman, erickson, and grant suggested firing the 1× performers: > Validated techniques to detect and weed out these poor performers could result in vast savings in time, effort, and cost. https://www.construx.com/blog/the-origins-of-10x-how-valid-is-the-underlying-research/ https://www.construx.com/blog/the-origins-of-10x-how-valid-i... https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362851.362858 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362851.362858 complaints and issue lists were not evaluated, but rewriting twice a month would have resulted in not completing the tasks they were being evaluated on
gcanyon 3y ago
I think there are two different kinds of 10x developer. Really they're probably better called 3x and infiniteX: 3x: I once knew a developer who could write code about as fast as they could type. It would generally work, be inefficient, and sometimes buggy, but it moved the ball forward relentlessly. If you had a basic task to get done, this person could do it and be done in 1/3rd, or even 1/5th, the time it might take someone else. infiniteX: I also once knew a developer who could solve problems almost no one else could. If you needed something to scale perfectly to accomplish a large task in reasonable time, this person was the perfect candidate. They weren't fast, and spent a lot of time just thinking. It sounds like the guy referenced above was the 3x type.

by wruza 3y ago

tshaddox 3y ago

> What else could anyone call them 10x for? Developing truly innovative solutions to hard problems? Doing the hard stuff like documenting code and writing automated tests? Fixing bugs that no one else could? Proactively identifying and resolving software reliability and performance issues?

phanimahesh 3y ago

Consistency was never a part of 10x developer definition as I understood it. That label is more often than not applied to "talent", however nebulous it is defined. Consistency is very underrated and hard to develop a habit for.

boxed 3y ago

A 10x dev can realize you're solving the wrong problem.

kragen 3y ago

in the original experiment (sackman, erickson, and grant) they were able to successfully solve programming-contest-style problems in a tenth of the time that other people required. so maybe ten hours instead of 100 hours. this should not surprise anyone who's worked on a programming team or who has looked at code they wrote ten or twenty years previously. the actual ratios were from 5:1 to 28:1, but that was an understatement, because some of the programmers couldn't solve the problem at all in the allotted time, if I understand correctly in some cases because they decided to solve it in assembly language. sackman, erickson, and grant suggested firing the 1× performers: > Validated techniques to detect and weed out these poor performers could result in vast savings in time, effort, and cost. https://www.construx.com/blog/the-origins-of-10x-how-valid-is-the-underlying-research/ https://www.construx.com/blog/the-origins-of-10x-how-valid-i... https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362851.362858 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362851.362858 complaints and issue lists were not evaluated, but rewriting twice a month would have resulted in not completing the tasks they were being evaluated on

gcanyon 3y ago

I think there are two different kinds of 10x developer. Really they're probably better called 3x and infiniteX: 3x: I once knew a developer who could write code about as fast as they could type. It would generally work, be inefficient, and sometimes buggy, but it moved the ball forward relentlessly. If you had a basic task to get done, this person could do it and be done in 1/3rd, or even 1/5th, the time it might take someone else. infiniteX: I also once knew a developer who could solve problems almost no one else could. If you needed something to scale perfectly to accomplish a large task in reasonable time, this person was the perfect candidate. They weren't fast, and spent a lot of time just thinking. It sounds like the guy referenced above was the 3x type.