4 ms·

> Have you literally never run into a problem that the average developer can not solve, but a expert can solve? In what time frame? > Even assuming that may

> Have you literally never run into a problem that the average developer can not solve, but a expert can solve? In what time frame? > Even assuming that maybe the average developer could come to learn ... already knowing how to solve it on short notice being over 10x. 10x? I'm not convinced. 10x is a pretty big increase, as illustrated above. Clearly I understand the gap, I explicitly mentioned it. I mentioned a month's work is quite valuable. I'm not the one diminishing that value, you are. I can totally buy instances of 10x improvement, but that's not what we're talking about and not how anyone is using the term. Everyone is talking about sustained output. No one gives a shit if you're 100x for five minutes but 0.5x the rest of the time. Your critique isn't wrong, per say, but it is a non sequitur to the conversation. I doubt even a staff level engineer is even a 10x above the junior. Will the staff level engineer write better code and faster? Hell yeah they will! But will it take a junior 10 years to write the same software a staff level does in a year? Maybe. But if it does I'm not convinced they're even trying, so not a fair comparison. 10 years is a lot of time. A lot of time to learn, refactor, or even build the damn thing from scratch a few dozen times. Seriously, 10x improvements are actually wild. But why dismiss a 10% gain as if it's nothing? Why is the smaller number bad? Is the need for the number to go up so strong that we don't care how divorced from reality it is?

Jensson 4mo ago
> I doubt even a staff level engineer is even a 10x above the junior Its not about staff vs junior, its about smart vs dumb programmers. You don't get smarter with time, you just gain more experience.
johnsmith1840 4mo ago
I believe in a 10x because it's everywhere. It doesn't mean more work it often means creativity. For example when I was an EE I worked at a company that had spent nearly 8 months, 50k on consultants, and easily 3 peoples full time for a lot of effort plus the testing side. I swapped that 800$ board out for essentially a lightbulb. Did identical work <50$ and was more reliable. That simple change was easily a 10x improvement if not more because the logistics of that one board was absurd. I'm proud of that EE work but code is identical. I would never call myself a 10x developer but I've wiped entire code bases more than once. Maybe I have "10x" moments? But to say this isn't a real phenomenon means you're in a super structured and political enviroment.
- pmontra 4mo ago
  I probably had that kind of 10x moment yesterday. I spent 2.5 hours analysing a feature request and I eventually advised my customer to think very carefully about it: it might solve a problem but the implementation time is going to be long, even with an AI, because of actual development and the time we will spend in testing it. Furthermore the new infrastructure will have recurring costs higher than what it saves. My advice is not to proceed. 2.5 hours vs 25 or more. 10x.
  - godelski 4mo ago
    > 2.5 hours vs 25 or more. 10x. My point is that these 10x moments aren't sustained. When we're talking about a "10xer" we're talking about someone over a longer period of time. For "in the moment"s and short term projects, 10xers certainly exist. There's definitely things I can do in a week that would take juniors more than 10. But for bigger projects? Can I do in a month what a junior cannot in 10 months? Can I do in 6mo what a junior cannot do in 5 years? I'd really doubt the latter and the amount of things I can do in a month that a junior can't do in 10 are a whole lot smaller than what I can do in a week that they can't do in 10
    - johnsmith1840 4mo ago
      You can but not the way you're saying. Once was part of a team where a mid level guy spent a year building/heavy maintenance of some catastrophe of a solution. They literally had the end users copy and pasting hundreds of commands from a generated excel sheet of a command per core (shudders). I spent ~2wks on a different architecture that was a massive improvement we abandoned their code base. He quit like 4 months later to join some faang. Granted that 2wks of work was on top of a distributed cloud infra that took me 6 months to build. So yes, a skilled dev might skip entire months of work someone else would make. What you seem to be describing is a companies skilled engineer designs something and passes down the spec. The guy making the spec is the 10x guy. For large projects it's even more pronounced. The article literally described someone who wasn't skilled they simply knew how to smooze the MBA's and a company with poor engineering leadership.
    - 4mo ago

Jensson 4mo ago

> I doubt even a staff level engineer is even a 10x above the junior Its not about staff vs junior, its about smart vs dumb programmers. You don't get smarter with time, you just gain more experience.

johnsmith1840 4mo ago

I believe in a 10x because it's everywhere. It doesn't mean more work it often means creativity. For example when I was an EE I worked at a company that had spent nearly 8 months, 50k on consultants, and easily 3 peoples full time for a lot of effort plus the testing side. I swapped that 800$ board out for essentially a lightbulb. Did identical work <50$ and was more reliable. That simple change was easily a 10x improvement if not more because the logistics of that one board was absurd. I'm proud of that EE work but code is identical. I would never call myself a 10x developer but I've wiped entire code bases more than once. Maybe I have "10x" moments? But to say this isn't a real phenomenon means you're in a super structured and political enviroment.

pmontra 4mo ago
I probably had that kind of 10x moment yesterday. I spent 2.5 hours analysing a feature request and I eventually advised my customer to think very carefully about it: it might solve a problem but the implementation time is going to be long, even with an AI, because of actual development and the time we will spend in testing it. Furthermore the new infrastructure will have recurring costs higher than what it saves. My advice is not to proceed. 2.5 hours vs 25 or more. 10x.
- godelski 4mo ago
  > 2.5 hours vs 25 or more. 10x. My point is that these 10x moments aren't sustained. When we're talking about a "10xer" we're talking about someone over a longer period of time. For "in the moment"s and short term projects, 10xers certainly exist. There's definitely things I can do in a week that would take juniors more than 10. But for bigger projects? Can I do in a month what a junior cannot in 10 months? Can I do in 6mo what a junior cannot do in 5 years? I'd really doubt the latter and the amount of things I can do in a month that a junior can't do in 10 are a whole lot smaller than what I can do in a week that they can't do in 10
  - johnsmith1840 4mo ago
    You can but not the way you're saying. Once was part of a team where a mid level guy spent a year building/heavy maintenance of some catastrophe of a solution. They literally had the end users copy and pasting hundreds of commands from a generated excel sheet of a command per core (shudders). I spent ~2wks on a different architecture that was a massive improvement we abandoned their code base. He quit like 4 months later to join some faang. Granted that 2wks of work was on top of a distributed cloud infra that took me 6 months to build. So yes, a skilled dev might skip entire months of work someone else would make. What you seem to be describing is a companies skilled engineer designs something and passes down the spec. The guy making the spec is the 10x guy. For large projects it's even more pronounced. The article literally described someone who wasn't skilled they simply knew how to smooze the MBA's and a company with poor engineering leadership.
  - 4mo ago