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Super-star programmers

Shengster 14y ago
It seems the general consensus is that a great programmer can write better quality code in less time than others. This requires a high level of aptitude and experience (which comes with practice). However, I feel the ability to write quality code quickly is just one facet of a great programmer's skillset. Often overlooked is the ability to communicate and collaborate with others effectively--which is just as important. With complex projects, I oftentimes find that the solution to my problems has already been solved. Sometimes the best code is no code at all.
- cema 14y ago
  Almost as important. I agree wholeheartedly: without communication, there is no team, just a bunch of folks sitting next to each other. (Still, working is more important than talking about it.)
  - beersigns 14y ago
    Communication/Collaboration & ability to write elegant code are pretty symbiotic but I'd generally say it's harder to find someone who can elegantly design/code a system than it is to find people to talk about it(Reqs, specs etc).
    - mmcconnell1618 14y ago
      Smaller teams means more of the communication takes place in the 10x programmer's head rather than in multiple meetings between 1x programmers. A team of 3 10X programmers should be more efficient than 30 1x programmers simply because communication will be more efficient.
      - beersigns 14y ago
        Hah, my own anecdotal evidence has been in favor of smaller teams for the communications reason you cite. Probably a bit of a bad analogy but it made me think of 3 Unix processes vs 30. Way harder to manage IPC between 30 processes as opposed to 3.
- zenocon 14y ago
  Agree -- also one of the most under-rated skills is someone who keeps up to date on all the latest frameworks / libraries, etc. More often than not, you're building something that solves a unique problem and you do that by stitching together pieces of other people's engineering. I would argue that this presents several sub-skills: Being able to do this quickly b/c you don't have to spend the time learning Being able to do this effectively -- by not painting yourself into a corner b/c you well versed in best practices and anti-patterns with using said 3rd party technology Being able to do this smartly -- because you are well-versed in a lot of the different options, you can effectively way their pros/cons, and make smart decisions on which 3rd party stuff to use, and when to build vs. buy I think these skills are more effective (towards your end goal) than simply being able to quickly code some brilliant labyrinth of an algorithm in less SLOC than a 1 or 2-xer. I feel like the emphasis is always put on the latter, and these skills are overlooked. Combine these with effective communication, and then you are talking about someone who can get things done.
  - enjo 14y ago
    I think you came close to the biggest differentiator: adaptability. Great programmers can dive into a new technology and use their past experience to quickly gain competency in it. If I hand node.js to a great programmer, I expect that he/she will be able to start being productive with it in just a day or two. Lesser programmers struggle to apply their past experience to that new paradigm. It takes months for them to truly get comfortable. That type of agility is hugely helpful in an organization.
- dalke 14y ago
  Here's what McConnell writes on the topic, in chapter 30 of "Making Software." (The rest of this comment comes from McConnell.) Some people have objected to the "10x" label, making an argument like "We had a super programmer on our team once. He was so obnoxious he alienated the whole team, and overall productivity was actually better without him. In general, any practical definition of a real 10x programmer has to include the effect the programmer has on the rest of the team. I have known super programmers who were obnoxious. More often, a supposed super programmer with an obnoxious personality was really an average programmer, or worse than average, using an obnoxious personality to hide a lack of performance. The true super programmers I've worked with have generally also been cooperative team players, although of course there are always exceptions."
smoyer 14y ago
I think every previous study of this topic has determined that the best programmers are those that can keep more layers of abstractions in their heads (I'll add a citation when/if I find it). For me, there are days of brilliance and days of complete distraction. I won't call myself a 10xer but I think much of my success has come because I truly love what I do. EDIT - I couldn't find a reference to the study I was remembering, but Steve McConnell of "Code Complete" fame has written a blog post describing how flawed the studies he's reviewed have been - http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09/origins-of-10x-how-valid-is-the-underlying-research.aspx http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09.... There are links to a lot of interesting sources and he clearly isn't arguing against the idea of dramatic differences in programmer ability ... just sayin'.
- Chris_Newton 14y ago
  I find that programming well, as with much in life, is often a matter of balancing different perspectives or competing priorities. Can I pay attention to the details without losing sight of the big picture? Can I do a good job technically, but keep within any other project constraints like budgets and timescales? Can I write code that is good enough to ship tomorrow, but maintainable enough to work on again next year? My best work tends to get done when I figure out the right balances. If I let one aspect become too dominant and neglect something else as a result, that’s usually when the problems start.
forgotAgain 14y ago
As I reached about half way through the article I got bored and my mind starting having stray thoughts - god this is long. Isn't it ironic that a superstar programmer would have been bored by now and stopped reading. - momentarily after that, I guess I just admitted that I'm not s superstar programmer. - momentarily after that, I wonder if there are writers who can transmit ten times as much information using one tenth of the words. - just now, I imagine magazines don't want superstar writers. That would diminish the amount of ad space they could sell.
- rapind 14y ago
  Yeah I barely made it through. I'm pretty sure this is a fluff marketing piece / near press release anyways.
- va_coder 14y ago
  I subscribe to the Economist and listen to it during my commute. Many of their articles are verbose, but it's still better, IMO, than many alternatives.
- kstenerud 14y ago
  You can achieve faster reading rates with this sort of stuff by only reading one sentence from the middle of each paragraph, or reading the second and last sentence in the rare case that the middle sentence wasn't enough. The content is of such low density that it takes little more than that to decode the meaning and intent of the article.
  - fragsworth 14y ago
    This is unfortunately true for most web articles and blog posts. I tend to do this somewhat subconsciously when I start to realize the content is sparse.
- bicknergseng 14y ago
  I stopped reading newspapers years ago when I realized they used a full page article to verbosely repeat the article title. Sadly, 140 characters seems to be the correct length for headline news in a society with no attention span.
drharris 14y ago
Forgive potential ignorance here, but people often quote Joel Spolsky as saying things like: "...the trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they strive, they will still produce something mediocre." What really genius-level things has Fog Creek done? I remember demoing FogBugz, and it was marginally better than its competitors, but it was far from a complete game-changer. Trello is ok, but it's only marginally better than a whiteboard with post-it notes. None of these reinvent an industry, or provide something so outstanding that people rush toward it. Don't get me wrong; I think Joel has a lot of good ideas in general, and Stack Exchange is indeed a game-changer. But as someone who continually talks about hiring "rock star programmers", I simply don't see a result that I'd consider "rock star" equivalent. But, maybe I'm missing something? Edit: More than that, I don't even consider myself a rock star developer, just a normal developer who loves learning new things and getting a lot of stuff done. I'd be thrilled to work for a Google or Microsoft, but what would attract "rock star developers" to Fog Creek? Basically, are fancy chairs enough? Isn't the most attractive thing a super interesting problem domain?
- ajross 14y ago
  I'm constantly fighting that same urge. The problem is one of domain. UI coding for straightforward data models (which is 90% of all "web" development) just ... isn't very hard or impressive. Great programmers in that regime produce software that is smaller, cleaner, tighter and higher quality. But it's still just a bug database or social thing or web store, etc... Anyone (even mediocre programmers) can look at it and say "I know how that works." There's plenty of rock star coding out there, of course. But it tends to be either hidden inside companies due to secrecy concerns (Google's scaling architecture or the NVIDIA driver stack, say) or exposed in the open source community instead of the startup world (Fabrice Bellard is a great example here). Startups all say they want rock stars, but then they put them to work doing "better versions" of the same boring stuff we all recognize. Which, if you think about it, is sort of what startups are supposed to do.
  - vbtemp 14y ago
    Although the article never used the word "super star", it's something I see around HN and the startup world quite a bit.... I sort of snicker when I see startups post jobs looking for "rock star" coders [1]. What self respecting person would call him or herself a "rock star", let alone apply for such a position? Maybe it's just a gimmick to get mediocre developers to get to work on boilerplate web work.. [1] I also saw a job posting recently where they were looking for a coder "to work on hard problems and blow a hole through the universe"... Why not have them blow bullshit of their face while they're at it? Is this just HR trying to sound too cool, or what?
Cacti 14y ago
I find this is typically due to a difference between the level of abstraction people are modeling in their head. A great coder can flip back and forth between several different levels (the 50m lines of OS code, the 100,000 of app code, the 1,000 of local code, etc) and have a reasonable idea of how those parts fit together. Not a complete understanding, just a basic idea. This is why mediocre programmers are what they are---they lack this ability and end up "flailing around", looking at somewhat random issues, bouncing back and forth, unable to see the pattern, and so end up spending more time writing code that eventually has to get rewritten. A great programmer will systematically take a problem apart so that even if they don't solve a problem in one minute, they've at least narrowed down the window of options for the future. This is also why great programmers are always great debuggers.
- Bill_Dimm 14y ago
  Good points. Just to elaborate a bit, the mediocre programmers tend to end up writing five functions that do almost the same thing because they don't have the vision to see how it all fits together and come up with a single, elegant solution. The code may very well work to accomplish the immediate task, but the lack of clarity and good planning makes it rather fragile if modification/extension is ever necessary. They tend to produce a lot of unnecessary lines of code that become a maintenance liability as the project grows.
- scyscy 14y ago
  Is "Cacti" a great programmer?
schrijver 14y ago
The only example here given of the powers of these superprogrammers, is that they have banded together to make an OS that’s technically impressive, but gets no traction in the marketplace and ends up all but forgotten (PC/GEOS)? Not very enticing…
- vadman 14y ago
  The article had the bit about Microsoft shutting them out of the market. In any case, superprogrammers != super marketplace conquerors, and IMO should not be judged as (un)impressive on that metric.
- droithomme 14y ago
  Have you written a lot of operating systems yourself then?
- pacaro 14y ago
  Having written both application and system code for PC/GEOS, it never appeared to have been written by 10Xers. For the record I've worked with EPOC-32, Windows, NextStep, Linux, VxWorks, and Nucleus - none of them was as painful as PC/GEOS (although EPOC-32 sometimes came close...)
Chris_Newton 14y ago
It’s interesting that in the research from Peopleware mentioned in the article, the factor of 10 difference was mostly between different organisations, while individuals within an organisation were typically quite close in performance. This suggests to me that the biggest influences on productivity for the organisation as a whole are probably to do with collaboration, culture and environment rather than extraordinary individual skill. Maybe the very best programmers aren’t extraordinary just because they can solve the most difficult problems, but also because they are better at presenting their solutions in ways that are more accessible to other developers. That would have the twin benefits of improving productivity in its own right and of implicitly teaching by example so less experienced developers in the organisation would tend to develop the same skills themselves over time. If you had a seed of programmers on that level and a culture that promoted mentoring, pair programming, code reviews or similar collaborative exercises, it’s not hard to imagine that such an organisation would develop significantly higher collective performance over time than another organisation without those benefits, even if most people joining each organisation were of a similar level of skill and experience to start with.
northbranch 14y ago
I think the author glossed over an important point: "Within individual firms, the difference in performance was only 20% or so." Is this because good developers congregate together, as suggested, or because having at least one good developer raises the productivity of those around him or her? They can certainly influence an organization through their choice of platforms and tools, aiding the productivity of everyone on the team.
tokenadult 14y ago
From the interesting submitted article: "An outfit in San Francisco called 'tenXer' has begun testing a service that aims to help people boost their mental accomplishments by up to tenfold—hence its name. . . . " . . . . "For those wishing to have a go, tenXer http://www.tenxer.com/ http://www.tenxer.com/ in San Francisco is currently offering a beta version of its tracking software to help people analyse their own performance, set goals for themselves and improve their lot. At present, the tracking software works only for programmers. But down the road, the same techniques could just as readily be applied to other occupations. . . . " The great thing about this is that many of us on Hacker News can put the claim to the test. Commenting on the claims of tenXer, which is what the writer for The Economist and several of the commenters here on Hacker News are doing, is interesting, and trying this out and seeing whether or not it works might be even more interesting. It's still unclear how much most individual human beings can improve themselves if they apply effort to self-improvement. It might be a good opportunity for career development for many HN participants to try this out.
jdlshore 14y ago
I'm disappointed to see the 10x programmer meme hit a publication like the Economist. There's no scientific evidence of 10x differences in programmer productivity. To quote Laurent Bossavit [1], who's investigated the studies people like McConnell use: "How strong is the support conferred to the 10x claim by the best-reputed list of references, for a reader persistent enough to follow the chain of citations back to primary sources? "Based on our close reading of the “10x files”, we can now answer: quite weak. "Not a single one of the references is to a replication, in the scientific sense of the term, of the original exploratory experiment. "The empirical data is in general quite old, most if not all of it predating widespread use of the Internet - which we can safely expect to have wrought major changes in programming practice. "None of the studies address the question of construct validity, that is, how meaningful it is to speak of an individual programmer’s productivity, and if it is meaningful, whether the experimental measurements line up adequately with that meaning." Don't get me wrong--I've certainly seen 10x (and greater) variations in productivity. But they've been due to factors other than inherent individual capability. They're things like * technical debt * familiarity with the codebase and problem domain * interruptions, distractions, multi-tasking and other office environment issues * choice of language - but this is a distant fourth compared to other the other three On top of all this, the Economist article is a thinly-veiled press release for tenXer, which is itself nothing more than an exercise in testerone-fueled egotism. tenXer measures activity, not productivity [2], and I expect the primary result of increasing your tenXer metrics will be less time thinking, more time hacking, and insufferable smugness. [1] The Leprechauns of Software Engineering explores what science is and how we distinguish between fact and folklore in software engineering. It specifically explores the 10x claim, and determines that it's folklore. http://leanpub.com/leprechauns http://leanpub.com/leprechauns [2] Productivity is defined as output over input, and the output of programming is software capability. No one's come up with a good measure of that yet. So any time someone claims they can prove increased productivity, ask them how they measure it. Chances are good you'll get a bogus value that measures activity instead, such as "lines of code." http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html
- dkersten 14y ago
  From what I heard the 10x meme came from a study back in the 60's where they timed something like ten programmers programming on punch cards for a couple of hours. Now, I didn't check the facts behind this myself, but if thats the case its hardly scientifically rigorous and hardly relevant at all today.
twakefield 14y ago
tl;dr - Quite a PR piece for http://www.tenxer.com/ http://www.tenxer.com/. Impressive that they could get the Economist to do this, even in a blog property.
codgercoder 14y ago
I see no comments yet on one of the biggest factors underlying highly productive programming: choosing the part of a development at which you can most easily excel. Sometimes there are legitimate areas where you have expertise, but mostly it's the well-defined areas that have no external roadblocks. And the rough parts get left for everyone else!
capkutay 14y ago
I'd see the most value in a programmer who could combine simple ideas/algorithms for some practical, yet useful application. Not necessarily a 10x l33t haxor genius.
presidentender 14y ago
I can think of one real, actual, verifiable superstar: Steve Yegge. There are more, but I don't know who they are. Taking his blogs at face value, and assuming that my sample size of 1 is enough, here's what I've got: "Superstars" get things done because they get things done. They may be ADD in their multitude of projects or in their personal lives, but while they're producing, they produce. They don't fuck around on reddit while they're coding. They might screw around interminably at other times - they might work only a few hours a day - but while they work, they're working, and that's it. They also get things done because they understand what the hell's going on, at least one or two layers of abstraction below the one they're officially working on. Stevey claims that his understanding stops at transistors - transistors are black boxes, but he gets what has to happen at the layers of abstraction above that, from the machine code to the guts of the interpreter. Particularly delicious? Steve Yegge worked at Geoworks (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st...), and he attributes their defeat by the likes of Microsoft not to superior marketing, but to the value of abstractions.
- zohebv 14y ago
  Steve Yegge was also unable to successfully maintain a not-too-complex 2D game and managed to blame Java for it http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.ht... 10Xer imples 10X some base level. Depending on what base you choose, Yegge can easily fall short.
  - presidentender 14y ago
    Oh holy shit. You have no idea. I "worked" on Wyvern in high school (in that I played a lot of Wyvern and made a few terribly shitty game areas and ended up being an administrator, or "Wizard" in classical MUD parlance). You know how Dwarf Fortress, that ASCII game, simulates a whole lot of ridiculous detail? Over-the-top, "the goblin's spear strikes the baby dwarf in the back upper left tooth and it really hurts so he cries for mommy"? Wyvern didn't quite have that, but the API implied most of the functionality for it. You didn't have inventory slots, you had body parts, which brought with them the ability to wear or wield certain other items. You could've written Wyvern in a much simpler fashion. A bright high schooler could make a game that had all of Wyvern's functionality at the end of its life. It's the mountain of "do a lot of other shit later" that got in the way. And that's what he's writing about in that blog post - not that he's perfect and Java sucks, but that he was trying to employ industry best practices and make everything perfect without compromises. It's not very hackerish, and sure, it was stupid. But the guy wasn't doing this for his day job and didn't have defined deadlines. He was a programmer, in other words, not a project manager. And that's where he fell down. Project management, not programming. And if you read back through his massive wall-of-text blog archives, you can see him mature as a programmer and project management. (Please note that I am an avowed fanboi, if you didn't catch that already, and as such everything I say must be taken with a grain of salt.)
evilbit 14y ago
one aspect this "superstar"-worship drivel^Harticle seems to ignore is the organizational contribution to success. i'd argue that individual contribution to any given project of substance is greatly overestimated, while contribution of the team (organization/culture/whatever) is unfairly underestimated. even in professional sports, superstar a winning team does not make.
- Ygg2 14y ago
  True, I remember one study (I can't recall the link sadly) that measured performance of several programming teams and found strong correlation between women in workforce and team performance. Another study in the book "Imagine" by Lehrer Jonah implies that creativity depends on the Q factor, inside a group. Here is a quote: "Uzzi’s data clearly demonstrates that the best Broadway shows were produced with intermediate levels of social intimacy. A musical produced at the ideal level of Q (2.6) was two and a half times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced with a low Q (<1.4) or a high Q (>3.2). It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics." I can see how hiring only rockstars which probably knew each other would increase the Q beyond the ideal level.
sunkencity 14y ago
My gut feeling tells me there's a 10x difference in productivity in almost any field of work.
- pradocchia 14y ago
  if you replace "productivity" with "effectiveness", it feels even more true, with the emphasis on doing the right work, rather volume of work. as programmers, if we do the right work, our software "produces" more, so we readily conflate the two, but in other fields where the product is less animate, effectiveness means your unit of output is the right output, even if near & local productivity doesn't vary much.
ilaksh 14y ago
Side issue with this article/tenXer press release: the thing about constantly reworking code being a sign of a bad programmer was wrong -- it actually takes more skill to be able to do routine refactoring. Not to say that that is always practical. Also, taking advantage of existing software makes a huge difference in 'productivity' at least as far as business people can measure. And someone who does that without acknowledging that they are doing it may appear to be a 'superstar' to management. For example, someone may just consider all of the source code they have ever written, regardless of the circumstances they wrote it in, to be a code library they can copy and paste in whatever company they currently work at. And not even acknowledge that they are reusing code they wrote years ago. So that sort of dishonesty irritates me, but generally I think taking advantage of existing software is the right thing to do and is the number one factor in what non-technical people would perceive as productivity. There is a huge difference in the time required to build a system using an easily configurable base like WordPress with plugins or components or by integrating open source software or libraries versus building various parts or all of the system from scratch. That's where you will see orders of magnitude difference in productivity where one person or group is reinventing a bunch of wheels that another group is not. And again there are many different ways of avoiding reinventing wheels, from using Google to basing software on existing open source programs to selecting more practical application programming languages/tools (like ones with things like garbage collection or more straightforward syntax or support for interactively configurable graphical components/plugins), or for example doing test driven development or in general having any type of automated QA rather than relying on a manual QA process entirely.
gruseom 14y ago
The big difference is that the best coders keep more of what they have produced, while the worst constantly have to rework whole sections. Whoa. Either I'm a worst programmer or this is clueless.
- akkartik 14y ago
  I said the same thing and had an interesting conversation with the author of the Thrust/Drag post cited in the article. http://plus.google.com/110440139189906861022/posts/84784VhCmzE http://plus.google.com/110440139189906861022/posts/84784VhCm...
deleted 14y ago
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will_work4tears 14y ago
Articles like this only depress me, making me realize that I'm a mere web developer and not even a REAL programmer, and in the realm of web developers probably not even remarkable. Which makes me probably LESS than mediocre as a programmer. So much for moving up in the world.

It seems the general consensus is that a great programmer can write better quality code in less time than others. This requires a high level of aptitude and experience (which comes with practice). However, I feel the ability to write quality code quickly is just one facet of a great programmer's skillset. Often overlooked is the ability to communicate and collaborate with others effectively--which is just as important. With complex projects, I oftentimes find that the solution to my problems has already been solved. Sometimes the best code is no code at all.

cema 14y ago
Almost as important. I agree wholeheartedly: without communication, there is no team, just a bunch of folks sitting next to each other. (Still, working is more important than talking about it.)
- beersigns 14y ago
  Communication/Collaboration & ability to write elegant code are pretty symbiotic but I'd generally say it's harder to find someone who can elegantly design/code a system than it is to find people to talk about it(Reqs, specs etc).
  - mmcconnell1618 14y ago
    Smaller teams means more of the communication takes place in the 10x programmer's head rather than in multiple meetings between 1x programmers. A team of 3 10X programmers should be more efficient than 30 1x programmers simply because communication will be more efficient.
    - beersigns 14y ago
      Hah, my own anecdotal evidence has been in favor of smaller teams for the communications reason you cite. Probably a bit of a bad analogy but it made me think of 3 Unix processes vs 30. Way harder to manage IPC between 30 processes as opposed to 3.
zenocon 14y ago
Agree -- also one of the most under-rated skills is someone who keeps up to date on all the latest frameworks / libraries, etc. More often than not, you're building something that solves a unique problem and you do that by stitching together pieces of other people's engineering. I would argue that this presents several sub-skills: Being able to do this quickly b/c you don't have to spend the time learning Being able to do this effectively -- by not painting yourself into a corner b/c you well versed in best practices and anti-patterns with using said 3rd party technology Being able to do this smartly -- because you are well-versed in a lot of the different options, you can effectively way their pros/cons, and make smart decisions on which 3rd party stuff to use, and when to build vs. buy I think these skills are more effective (towards your end goal) than simply being able to quickly code some brilliant labyrinth of an algorithm in less SLOC than a 1 or 2-xer. I feel like the emphasis is always put on the latter, and these skills are overlooked. Combine these with effective communication, and then you are talking about someone who can get things done.
- enjo 14y ago
  I think you came close to the biggest differentiator: adaptability. Great programmers can dive into a new technology and use their past experience to quickly gain competency in it. If I hand node.js to a great programmer, I expect that he/she will be able to start being productive with it in just a day or two. Lesser programmers struggle to apply their past experience to that new paradigm. It takes months for them to truly get comfortable. That type of agility is hugely helpful in an organization.
dalke 14y ago
Here's what McConnell writes on the topic, in chapter 30 of "Making Software." (The rest of this comment comes from McConnell.) Some people have objected to the "10x" label, making an argument like "We had a super programmer on our team once. He was so obnoxious he alienated the whole team, and overall productivity was actually better without him. In general, any practical definition of a real 10x programmer has to include the effect the programmer has on the rest of the team. I have known super programmers who were obnoxious. More often, a supposed super programmer with an obnoxious personality was really an average programmer, or worse than average, using an obnoxious personality to hide a lack of performance. The true super programmers I've worked with have generally also been cooperative team players, although of course there are always exceptions."

smoyer 14y ago

I think every previous study of this topic has determined that the best programmers are those that can keep more layers of abstractions in their heads (I'll add a citation when/if I find it). For me, there are days of brilliance and days of complete distraction. I won't call myself a 10xer but I think much of my success has come because I truly love what I do. EDIT - I couldn't find a reference to the study I was remembering, but Steve McConnell of "Code Complete" fame has written a blog post describing how flawed the studies he's reviewed have been - http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09/origins-of-10x-how-valid-is-the-underlying-research.aspx http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09.... There are links to a lot of interesting sources and he clearly isn't arguing against the idea of dramatic differences in programmer ability ... just sayin'.

Chris_Newton 14y ago
I find that programming well, as with much in life, is often a matter of balancing different perspectives or competing priorities. Can I pay attention to the details without losing sight of the big picture? Can I do a good job technically, but keep within any other project constraints like budgets and timescales? Can I write code that is good enough to ship tomorrow, but maintainable enough to work on again next year? My best work tends to get done when I figure out the right balances. If I let one aspect become too dominant and neglect something else as a result, that’s usually when the problems start.

forgotAgain 14y ago

As I reached about half way through the article I got bored and my mind starting having stray thoughts - god this is long. Isn't it ironic that a superstar programmer would have been bored by now and stopped reading. - momentarily after that, I guess I just admitted that I'm not s superstar programmer. - momentarily after that, I wonder if there are writers who can transmit ten times as much information using one tenth of the words. - just now, I imagine magazines don't want superstar writers. That would diminish the amount of ad space they could sell.

rapind 14y ago
Yeah I barely made it through. I'm pretty sure this is a fluff marketing piece / near press release anyways.
va_coder 14y ago
I subscribe to the Economist and listen to it during my commute. Many of their articles are verbose, but it's still better, IMO, than many alternatives.
kstenerud 14y ago
You can achieve faster reading rates with this sort of stuff by only reading one sentence from the middle of each paragraph, or reading the second and last sentence in the rare case that the middle sentence wasn't enough. The content is of such low density that it takes little more than that to decode the meaning and intent of the article.
- fragsworth 14y ago
  This is unfortunately true for most web articles and blog posts. I tend to do this somewhat subconsciously when I start to realize the content is sparse.
bicknergseng 14y ago
I stopped reading newspapers years ago when I realized they used a full page article to verbosely repeat the article title. Sadly, 140 characters seems to be the correct length for headline news in a society with no attention span.

drharris 14y ago

Forgive potential ignorance here, but people often quote Joel Spolsky as saying things like: "...the trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they strive, they will still produce something mediocre." What really genius-level things has Fog Creek done? I remember demoing FogBugz, and it was marginally better than its competitors, but it was far from a complete game-changer. Trello is ok, but it's only marginally better than a whiteboard with post-it notes. None of these reinvent an industry, or provide something so outstanding that people rush toward it. Don't get me wrong; I think Joel has a lot of good ideas in general, and Stack Exchange is indeed a game-changer. But as someone who continually talks about hiring "rock star programmers", I simply don't see a result that I'd consider "rock star" equivalent. But, maybe I'm missing something? Edit: More than that, I don't even consider myself a rock star developer, just a normal developer who loves learning new things and getting a lot of stuff done. I'd be thrilled to work for a Google or Microsoft, but what would attract "rock star developers" to Fog Creek? Basically, are fancy chairs enough? Isn't the most attractive thing a super interesting problem domain?

ajross 14y ago
I'm constantly fighting that same urge. The problem is one of domain. UI coding for straightforward data models (which is 90% of all "web" development) just ... isn't very hard or impressive. Great programmers in that regime produce software that is smaller, cleaner, tighter and higher quality. But it's still just a bug database or social thing or web store, etc... Anyone (even mediocre programmers) can look at it and say "I know how that works." There's plenty of rock star coding out there, of course. But it tends to be either hidden inside companies due to secrecy concerns (Google's scaling architecture or the NVIDIA driver stack, say) or exposed in the open source community instead of the startup world (Fabrice Bellard is a great example here). Startups all say they want rock stars, but then they put them to work doing "better versions" of the same boring stuff we all recognize. Which, if you think about it, is sort of what startups are supposed to do.
- vbtemp 14y ago
  Although the article never used the word "super star", it's something I see around HN and the startup world quite a bit.... I sort of snicker when I see startups post jobs looking for "rock star" coders [1]. What self respecting person would call him or herself a "rock star", let alone apply for such a position? Maybe it's just a gimmick to get mediocre developers to get to work on boilerplate web work.. [1] I also saw a job posting recently where they were looking for a coder "to work on hard problems and blow a hole through the universe"... Why not have them blow bullshit of their face while they're at it? Is this just HR trying to sound too cool, or what?

Cacti 14y ago

I find this is typically due to a difference between the level of abstraction people are modeling in their head. A great coder can flip back and forth between several different levels (the 50m lines of OS code, the 100,000 of app code, the 1,000 of local code, etc) and have a reasonable idea of how those parts fit together. Not a complete understanding, just a basic idea. This is why mediocre programmers are what they are---they lack this ability and end up "flailing around", looking at somewhat random issues, bouncing back and forth, unable to see the pattern, and so end up spending more time writing code that eventually has to get rewritten. A great programmer will systematically take a problem apart so that even if they don't solve a problem in one minute, they've at least narrowed down the window of options for the future. This is also why great programmers are always great debuggers.

Bill_Dimm 14y ago
Good points. Just to elaborate a bit, the mediocre programmers tend to end up writing five functions that do almost the same thing because they don't have the vision to see how it all fits together and come up with a single, elegant solution. The code may very well work to accomplish the immediate task, but the lack of clarity and good planning makes it rather fragile if modification/extension is ever necessary. They tend to produce a lot of unnecessary lines of code that become a maintenance liability as the project grows.
scyscy 14y ago
Is "Cacti" a great programmer?

schrijver 14y ago

The only example here given of the powers of these superprogrammers, is that they have banded together to make an OS that’s technically impressive, but gets no traction in the marketplace and ends up all but forgotten (PC/GEOS)? Not very enticing…

vadman 14y ago
The article had the bit about Microsoft shutting them out of the market. In any case, superprogrammers != super marketplace conquerors, and IMO should not be judged as (un)impressive on that metric.
droithomme 14y ago
Have you written a lot of operating systems yourself then?
pacaro 14y ago
Having written both application and system code for PC/GEOS, it never appeared to have been written by 10Xers. For the record I've worked with EPOC-32, Windows, NextStep, Linux, VxWorks, and Nucleus - none of them was as painful as PC/GEOS (although EPOC-32 sometimes came close...)

Chris_Newton 14y ago

It’s interesting that in the research from Peopleware mentioned in the article, the factor of 10 difference was mostly between different organisations, while individuals within an organisation were typically quite close in performance. This suggests to me that the biggest influences on productivity for the organisation as a whole are probably to do with collaboration, culture and environment rather than extraordinary individual skill. Maybe the very best programmers aren’t extraordinary just because they can solve the most difficult problems, but also because they are better at presenting their solutions in ways that are more accessible to other developers. That would have the twin benefits of improving productivity in its own right and of implicitly teaching by example so less experienced developers in the organisation would tend to develop the same skills themselves over time. If you had a seed of programmers on that level and a culture that promoted mentoring, pair programming, code reviews or similar collaborative exercises, it’s not hard to imagine that such an organisation would develop significantly higher collective performance over time than another organisation without those benefits, even if most people joining each organisation were of a similar level of skill and experience to start with.

northbranch 14y ago

I think the author glossed over an important point: "Within individual firms, the difference in performance was only 20% or so." Is this because good developers congregate together, as suggested, or because having at least one good developer raises the productivity of those around him or her? They can certainly influence an organization through their choice of platforms and tools, aiding the productivity of everyone on the team.

tokenadult 14y ago

From the interesting submitted article: "An outfit in San Francisco called 'tenXer' has begun testing a service that aims to help people boost their mental accomplishments by up to tenfold—hence its name. . . . " . . . . "For those wishing to have a go, tenXer http://www.tenxer.com/ http://www.tenxer.com/ in San Francisco is currently offering a beta version of its tracking software to help people analyse their own performance, set goals for themselves and improve their lot. At present, the tracking software works only for programmers. But down the road, the same techniques could just as readily be applied to other occupations. . . . " The great thing about this is that many of us on Hacker News can put the claim to the test. Commenting on the claims of tenXer, which is what the writer for The Economist and several of the commenters here on Hacker News are doing, is interesting, and trying this out and seeing whether or not it works might be even more interesting. It's still unclear how much most individual human beings can improve themselves if they apply effort to self-improvement. It might be a good opportunity for career development for many HN participants to try this out.

jdlshore 14y ago

I'm disappointed to see the 10x programmer meme hit a publication like the Economist. There's no scientific evidence of 10x differences in programmer productivity. To quote Laurent Bossavit [1], who's investigated the studies people like McConnell use: "How strong is the support conferred to the 10x claim by the best-reputed list of references, for a reader persistent enough to follow the chain of citations back to primary sources? "Based on our close reading of the “10x files”, we can now answer: quite weak. "Not a single one of the references is to a replication, in the scientific sense of the term, of the original exploratory experiment. "The empirical data is in general quite old, most if not all of it predating widespread use of the Internet - which we can safely expect to have wrought major changes in programming practice. "None of the studies address the question of construct validity, that is, how meaningful it is to speak of an individual programmer’s productivity, and if it is meaningful, whether the experimental measurements line up adequately with that meaning." Don't get me wrong--I've certainly seen 10x (and greater) variations in productivity. But they've been due to factors other than inherent individual capability. They're things like * technical debt * familiarity with the codebase and problem domain * interruptions, distractions, multi-tasking and other office environment issues * choice of language - but this is a distant fourth compared to other the other three On top of all this, the Economist article is a thinly-veiled press release for tenXer, which is itself nothing more than an exercise in testerone-fueled egotism. tenXer measures activity, not productivity [2], and I expect the primary result of increasing your tenXer metrics will be less time thinking, more time hacking, and insufferable smugness. [1] The Leprechauns of Software Engineering explores what science is and how we distinguish between fact and folklore in software engineering. It specifically explores the 10x claim, and determines that it's folklore. http://leanpub.com/leprechauns http://leanpub.com/leprechauns [2] Productivity is defined as output over input, and the output of programming is software capability. No one's come up with a good measure of that yet. So any time someone claims they can prove increased productivity, ask them how they measure it. Chances are good you'll get a bogus value that measures activity instead, such as "lines of code." http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html

dkersten 14y ago
From what I heard the 10x meme came from a study back in the 60's where they timed something like ten programmers programming on punch cards for a couple of hours. Now, I didn't check the facts behind this myself, but if thats the case its hardly scientifically rigorous and hardly relevant at all today.

twakefield 14y ago

tl;dr - Quite a PR piece for http://www.tenxer.com/ http://www.tenxer.com/. Impressive that they could get the Economist to do this, even in a blog property.

codgercoder 14y ago

I see no comments yet on one of the biggest factors underlying highly productive programming: choosing the part of a development at which you can most easily excel. Sometimes there are legitimate areas where you have expertise, but mostly it's the well-defined areas that have no external roadblocks. And the rough parts get left for everyone else!

capkutay 14y ago

I'd see the most value in a programmer who could combine simple ideas/algorithms for some practical, yet useful application. Not necessarily a 10x l33t haxor genius.

presidentender 14y ago

I can think of one real, actual, verifiable superstar: Steve Yegge. There are more, but I don't know who they are. Taking his blogs at face value, and assuming that my sample size of 1 is enough, here's what I've got: "Superstars" get things done because they get things done. They may be ADD in their multitude of projects or in their personal lives, but while they're producing, they produce. They don't fuck around on reddit while they're coding. They might screw around interminably at other times - they might work only a few hours a day - but while they work, they're working, and that's it. They also get things done because they understand what the hell's going on, at least one or two layers of abstraction below the one they're officially working on. Stevey claims that his understanding stops at transistors - transistors are black boxes, but he gets what has to happen at the layers of abstraction above that, from the machine code to the guts of the interpreter. Particularly delicious? Steve Yegge worked at Geoworks (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st...), and he attributes their defeat by the likes of Microsoft not to superior marketing, but to the value of abstractions.

zohebv 14y ago
Steve Yegge was also unable to successfully maintain a not-too-complex 2D game and managed to blame Java for it http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.ht... 10Xer imples 10X some base level. Depending on what base you choose, Yegge can easily fall short.
- presidentender 14y ago
  Oh holy shit. You have no idea. I "worked" on Wyvern in high school (in that I played a lot of Wyvern and made a few terribly shitty game areas and ended up being an administrator, or "Wizard" in classical MUD parlance). You know how Dwarf Fortress, that ASCII game, simulates a whole lot of ridiculous detail? Over-the-top, "the goblin's spear strikes the baby dwarf in the back upper left tooth and it really hurts so he cries for mommy"? Wyvern didn't quite have that, but the API implied most of the functionality for it. You didn't have inventory slots, you had body parts, which brought with them the ability to wear or wield certain other items. You could've written Wyvern in a much simpler fashion. A bright high schooler could make a game that had all of Wyvern's functionality at the end of its life. It's the mountain of "do a lot of other shit later" that got in the way. And that's what he's writing about in that blog post - not that he's perfect and Java sucks, but that he was trying to employ industry best practices and make everything perfect without compromises. It's not very hackerish, and sure, it was stupid. But the guy wasn't doing this for his day job and didn't have defined deadlines. He was a programmer, in other words, not a project manager. And that's where he fell down. Project management, not programming. And if you read back through his massive wall-of-text blog archives, you can see him mature as a programmer and project management. (Please note that I am an avowed fanboi, if you didn't catch that already, and as such everything I say must be taken with a grain of salt.)

evilbit 14y ago

one aspect this "superstar"-worship drivel^Harticle seems to ignore is the organizational contribution to success. i'd argue that individual contribution to any given project of substance is greatly overestimated, while contribution of the team (organization/culture/whatever) is unfairly underestimated. even in professional sports, superstar a winning team does not make.

Ygg2 14y ago
True, I remember one study (I can't recall the link sadly) that measured performance of several programming teams and found strong correlation between women in workforce and team performance. Another study in the book "Imagine" by Lehrer Jonah implies that creativity depends on the Q factor, inside a group. Here is a quote: "Uzzi’s data clearly demonstrates that the best Broadway shows were produced with intermediate levels of social intimacy. A musical produced at the ideal level of Q (2.6) was two and a half times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced with a low Q (<1.4) or a high Q (>3.2). It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics." I can see how hiring only rockstars which probably knew each other would increase the Q beyond the ideal level.

sunkencity 14y ago

My gut feeling tells me there's a 10x difference in productivity in almost any field of work.

pradocchia 14y ago
if you replace "productivity" with "effectiveness", it feels even more true, with the emphasis on doing the right work, rather volume of work. as programmers, if we do the right work, our software "produces" more, so we readily conflate the two, but in other fields where the product is less animate, effectiveness means your unit of output is the right output, even if near & local productivity doesn't vary much.

ilaksh 14y ago

Side issue with this article/tenXer press release: the thing about constantly reworking code being a sign of a bad programmer was wrong -- it actually takes more skill to be able to do routine refactoring. Not to say that that is always practical. Also, taking advantage of existing software makes a huge difference in 'productivity' at least as far as business people can measure. And someone who does that without acknowledging that they are doing it may appear to be a 'superstar' to management. For example, someone may just consider all of the source code they have ever written, regardless of the circumstances they wrote it in, to be a code library they can copy and paste in whatever company they currently work at. And not even acknowledge that they are reusing code they wrote years ago. So that sort of dishonesty irritates me, but generally I think taking advantage of existing software is the right thing to do and is the number one factor in what non-technical people would perceive as productivity. There is a huge difference in the time required to build a system using an easily configurable base like WordPress with plugins or components or by integrating open source software or libraries versus building various parts or all of the system from scratch. That's where you will see orders of magnitude difference in productivity where one person or group is reinventing a bunch of wheels that another group is not. And again there are many different ways of avoiding reinventing wheels, from using Google to basing software on existing open source programs to selecting more practical application programming languages/tools (like ones with things like garbage collection or more straightforward syntax or support for interactively configurable graphical components/plugins), or for example doing test driven development or in general having any type of automated QA rather than relying on a manual QA process entirely.

gruseom 14y ago

The big difference is that the best coders keep more of what they have produced, while the worst constantly have to rework whole sections. Whoa. Either I'm a worst programmer or this is clueless.

akkartik 14y ago
I said the same thing and had an interesting conversation with the author of the Thrust/Drag post cited in the article. http://plus.google.com/110440139189906861022/posts/84784VhCmzE http://plus.google.com/110440139189906861022/posts/84784VhCm...

deleted 14y ago

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will_work4tears 14y ago

Articles like this only depress me, making me realize that I'm a mere web developer and not even a REAL programmer, and in the realm of web developers probably not even remarkable. Which makes me probably LESS than mediocre as a programmer. So much for moving up in the world.