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There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones
- clubhi 14y agoI think there are 10x developers because the vast majority are 1x.
- rurounijones 14y agoThat of course it depends on what you call a "developer" and what your standard of "1x developer" is. I know people who are full-time developers who I would class as less than 1x
- barren_samadhi 14y agoSo, Zipf rather than Bell .. ?
- mamcx 14y ago10x at what? What is 1x? Programming is a wide field. In some tasks, I'm faster. In others, very slow. Give opportunity to do only the things I'm good (and pay me!) and happy I will. But... I need to do a lot of stuff I'm not good, or is unrelated to programming per se (I'm a solo startup) and sometimes is like the time is stopped...
- kinleyd 14y agoI'm of the same view. I think there is some fuzzy logic going on here: If the majority are 1/10 developers (as the op asserts) and thus form the baseline x, aren't the 1/1 developers by definition 10x developers?
- clubhi 14y agohaha exactly... It doesn't matter at what number you set as the baseline. We would say a developer's productivity is an average (mode perhaps) of all developers' productivity. There are a percentage of them that are 10x more productive. Its much worse than that in my experience. Some people won't be able to jump over hurdles no matter how hard they try. I'm like that for making a website look good (pre-boostrap). I'd eff around an entire week on swapping colors and changing pixels sizes.
- rorrr 14y agoBullshit. Watch Notch (creator of Minecraft) program. That guy is insanely efficient.
- DannyBee 14y agoThere is no offer of proof for the claim that there are no 10x developers past claiming "they've not seen it in practice" I have seen them with my own eyes. They are in fact, able to do things 10x faster than others. There are not a huge number of them, but they exist. At Google, folks like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are easily 10x more productive than "the baseline proficient engineer". Any proficient engineer who has worked with them can tell you the same. Again, i won't claim there are many of these kinds of folks, but they definitely exist. (This also doesn't mean 1/10th developers don't exist, and aren't common, but ...)
- smoyer 14y agoYou've just described a two magnitude spread between an incompetent programmer and a "rockstar" (I hate that term), with the average being a 1x programmer. I tend to believe that's true because I've seen a few 10x programmers (and I think I've had days where I have been one), but I've definitely seen 1/10x programmers. This sounds about right.
- yasth 14y agoEh the thing of it is, everyone can have 10x days, as a developer's output variability is high, the trick is to hit that consistently, and to do that you basically have to have 100x days at least once in a while.
- sliverstorm 14y agoI can believe 10x. Though, when people start throwing around numbers like, "A great developer is literally 1,000x more productive than an average developer!" I raise an eyebrow.
- reeses 14y agoDepending on what you mean by the average developer, 1000x is plausible. If you think in terms of reliability, it's the difference between a four nines engineer and a one nine. That guy who pushes untested code that brings the site down for a day vs. the woman who has to roll back her code once in five years because she made a fencepost error is an example of how such variances in developer "productivity" can be measured by an organization, especially one that does not consider itself a technology company. Think of floor personnel in stores. There are some who start off several steps behind because they have a lot of sick days, come in right at the start of their shift (so end up starting "late"), and take dozens of smoke breaks throughout the day without clocking out. They may chisel a minute or two extra from every break even when the store is busy. On top of this, they may drag their way through their workday. You may need 3-5 of this person to do the job of one, then you need someone to manage them. They're going to be significantly less productive than the scarily chipper go-getter who wants to be store director, gets in early to start work on time, skips breaks or takes them only when things are slow, is very upbeat and engages customers, and offers to take extra shifts to help out. You can leave this person alone in the store and they'll keep things moving along. Measuring productivity is a difficult science. In some environments, it's screwing up less than other people. In some, it's a simple measure of something silly, such as function points. Scientific Management has seeded a lot of bad ideas in managers' minds about measuring the value of individual contributors.
- downtoearth 14y agoHow to tell whether I'm a 1/10x developer or not? Often it took me 3 months just to get a asp.net web application, as I'm unable to cope with the frequent requirement changes.
- straight_talk 14y agoMake an estimate when you start a task. If it takes you 10x the time you probably are.
- downtoearth 14y agoGood idea, number always tell the truth.
- pedalpete 14y agoI was wondering just the same thing. I can build features and ship code, but I'm definitely slower than my co-worker (who has been on the project for over 1 year, while I'm just in my first 3 months). How can we measure where we fit on the scale?
- gcheong 14y agoA lot of the productivity difference is probably due to overall familiarity with the code base. In a year from now when you have to fix a bug or add a feature you will probably know where to go and have an idea of what needs to be done rather than having to go hunting for it or asking another developer. If a project is started from scratch I imagine a lot of difference in productivity is due to familiarity with the tools, frameworks, api's, etc. used.
- crazygringo 14y agoFor well-defined programming tasks, I could agree that there's a standard "professional" baseline, and that, at most, other developers could be twice as good/fast, at most. (And of course, there are the 1/10 developers too, and even the "negative" developers that do more harm than good.) But the 10x factor is real. But it comes into play, I think, more for architecture roles, or incredibly key algorithms, etc. It's a whole different beast from "proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain." These are the developers who have the intelligence, experience, and organizational understand to make the kinds of decisions that keep a team or product running smoothly along, as opposed to getting mired in spaghetti code, rewrites, refactoring, etc. And the larger and more complex projects are, the harder this is, and the more valuable it is. And the more of an art it is, than a science. The idea of 10x developers isn't that a single developer performs simple tasks 10x better/faster, but rather that they bring such insight into complex tasks, that they can wind up achieving 10x as much, possibly for the whole team, because they make other developers more productive as well. Or, they see a well-defined task, and see a different, better way of doing it, that only takes 1/10th the time. But the 10x is the gain they bring to the company -- and sometimes it is far greater than 10x.
- metaphorm 14y agothis is really well stated. i've noticed the exact same thing. most programmers at the baseline level of proficiency take about the same amount of time to perform any particular, well specified task. its the stuff that isn't well specified where the huge differences come into effect.
- learc83 14y agoSomething seems a bit off about that anecdote to me--exaggerated perhaps? There's a "highly recommended", "smart", Ph.D candidate developer and he can't do in 6 weeks what the author could do do in 30 minutes, even with the author holding his hand? That's not a 10x difference, that's a 500x difference.
- straight_talk 14y agoYeah, I've worked with quite a few ppl like this. Usually they are very smart, read programming books, blogs HN, etc. and interview very well. The problem seems to be motivation, as the author pointed they face a problem and don't have the will power to keep throwing possible solutions at it. Or the motivation to write those 500 lines of CRUD and simple business logic.
- xarien 14y agoLet's say we redefine the definition of a developer to baseline at what's currently stated as 10x. What if the demand for programming far exceeds the supply of 10x devs? Fact: the above sentence isn't actually a hypothetical, it's the current state of the world. You know what? At the end of the day, it IS harder to teach someone to fish than to fish for them. This is a known fact. This is why developing talent is an investment. You don't just get to reap the rewards from the get go. You invest and hope for a high yield. The person you let go sounded like they had great potential (wrote decent and working code, but just a little slow). Stop being so damn arrogant.
- rurounijones 14y ago2 weeks vs 30 minutes is "a little slow"? Sounding a bit mercenary but if the ROI on your investment is not high then you abandon the investment and find another one. It sounds like this developer was not returning a good enough ROI (and believe me I hate using that term with regards to people) on the educational investment being made into him, maybe they needed him to get up to speed quickly and it just wasn't happening.
- xarien 14y agoNot when you are talking about human resources. There is a very large up front investment in order to train people up.
- dahart 14y agoThere are a small few very gifted people who are prolific coders, and there are a small few very terrible coders who manage to get a job but can't produce decent work. But FAR more often than spotting either category "in the wild", in my own experience, I have watched poor management turn a productive developer into an unproductive one, or watched circumstance and luck turn someone who's not natually great into a central and productive team member. I would say, blanket generalization, that at any company that has more than 5-10 developers, team dynamics and management are 10x more important than whether individual programmers are rock stars or duds.
- Maven911 14y agoThis. People forget the impact of good management, supportive teamwor and morale If worked in a place with the 5-10x devs (at least compared to te rest of the team) but when the workplace is hoatile, people dont eat together, etc. You won't be able to rretain people for too long.
- superdude 14y agoI guess I don't get it. This Ph.D candidate was recommended by the previous CTO and was the one spearheading the framework transition...and then was fired after 2 weeks? But junior devs at the previous firm were given months to get up to speed?
- MBCook 14y agoThe fact that someone was recommended by a chain of people doesn't mean that good, or even competent. Perhaps the old CTOs weren't competent to judge or didn't have enough experience to have a proper baseline. It's quite possible that I could judge someone at some task (say cutting & laying intricate tiles), and think they're quite good. They may seem fast to me because they're doing something that would take me forever. But if you brought in a real professional, they may laugh and say worker is going to slow. The author said that the coder in question didn't show any improvement after 2 weeks of coaching. The developers at the previous firm he mentioned were slowly improving, that's why he kept them. From my reading I got the impression that if the PhD candidate had improved, he would still be there.
- r00fus 14y agoSometimes it's not about the person, it's about the team and environment. I've been both on the competent and not-so-competent sides, and the environment I'm working in made a ton of difference (note: it is a feedback loop, so mistakes and lack of delivery cause your environment to get tougher, and vice-versa). Perhaps the guy felt he was going to get a raw deal and so was spending the few weeks looking for another job? Who knows. Lots of potential variables that might have turned an otherwise stellar coder into a quivering mess. The plural of anecdote != data.
- reefab 14y agoI just had that happen at my company. New Dev hired by the CEO without input from anyone else. She was not bad, but terribly sloooooooooooooooow. She indeed took 10x longer to do common tasks compared to other devs. It's not that she wasn't smart or reticent to learn new things, just that her way of working through problems was incredibly long winded for some reason. It's not something that you can easily re-train someone to fix, it's a fundamental problem and that combined with other issues made us let her go.
- vwinsyee 14y agoI'm reminded of a paper [1] that "discovered a test which divides programming sheep from non-programming goats." The claim is that there are two distinct populations of people (those who can programming and those who inherently cannot). Each population has its own variance, e.g. as the OP mentions, the best programmer in each population might be 30-40% better than a lower-tier programmer in the same population. But the average programmer in the "can program" population is a magnitude better than the average progammer in the "can't program" population. This seems to closely match what the OP is describing. [1] http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/ http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/
- touristtam 14y agoThis is why I like the news over here. Thanks. :)
- justin_vanw 14y agoWell, if the author kindof hasn't seen it, I guess I should ignore this stuff: Boehm, Barry W., and Philip N. Papaccio. 1988. "Understanding and Controlling Software Costs." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-14, no. 10 (October): 1462-77. Boehm, Barry, 1981. Software Engineering Economics, Boston, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1981. Boehm, Barry, et al, 2000. Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II, Boston, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 2000. Boehm, Barry W., T. E. Gray, and T. Seewaldt. 1984. "Prototyping Versus Specifying: A Multiproject Experiment." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-10, no. 3 (May): 290-303. Also in Jones 1986b. Card, David N. 1987. "A Software Technology Evaluation Program." Information and Software Technology 29, no. 6 (July/August): 291-300. Curtis, Bill. 1981. "Substantiating Programmer Variability." Proceedings of the IEEE 69, no. 7: 846. Curtis, Bill, et al. 1986. "Software Psychology: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Program." Proceedings of the IEEE 74, no. 8: 1092-1106. DeMarco, Tom, and Timothy Lister. 1985. "Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace." Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Software Engineering. Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 268-72. DeMarco, Tom and Timothy Lister, 1999. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2d Ed. New York: Dorset House, 1999. Mills, Harlan D. 1983. Software Productivity. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown. Sackman, H., W.J. Erikson, and E. E. Grant. 1968. "Exploratory Experimental Studies Comparing Online and Offline Programming Performance." Communications of the ACM 11, no. 1 (January): 3-11. Sheil, B. A. 1981. “The Psychological Study of Programming,” Computing Surveys, Vol. 13. No. 1, March 1981. Valett, J., and F. E. McGarry. 1989. "A Summary of Software Measurement Experiences in the Software Engineering Laboratory." Journal of Systems and Software 9, no. 2 (February): 137-48. (References from http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/Origins_of_10X_%E2%80%93_How_Valid_is_the_Underlying_Research_/ http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/Origins_of_...)
- jdlshore 14y agoHave you read those references? Or are you just quoting them blindly? Laurent Bossavit has read them, and he reports that they are, for the most part, reporting on each other and on anecdotes. There is no actual, scientific evidence for the "10x programmer." He writes up his search for the evidence in his book "The Leprechauns of Software Development." It's a fascinating look at how a supposedly-rational group of people has taken a myth and blown up into well-known "fact."
- Maven911 14y agoI think its important to note that if we didn't have ten fingers and created a decimal numbering system, we probably wouldn't be using the 10x factor
- krapp 14y agoPerhaps, but then our 6x or whatever factor would still mean essentially same thing.
- rhizome 14y agoThink of how much better programmers would be if they were being measured in base20, though. "There are no 20x programmers, but there are 1/20 programmers!"
- krapp 14y agoThat would make me automatically twice as good as I am now! Now I just need to find a surgeon with questionable morals...
- gojomo 14y agoIndeed. I settle for nothing less than the 0x10x programmers.
- rhizome 14y agoYeah, that changes everything.
- nhashem 14y ago"x10 developers" are, in fact, proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain. Well, I'd say this is only true for your typical corporate entity, where their products are basically just web applications that represent a state machine using some sort of database store for persistence (which is... basically everything). By the time the company has achieved some size, there's enough process and bureaucracy and projects mostly consist of what the OP described -- migrating from one framework to another, or some other incremental enhancement that's hardly pushing any sort of business of technology threshold. At previous employers that fit this description, I could have easily been 10x more productive if I didn't have to endure four hour sprint planning meetings or be required by an understaffed QA/DBA/sysadmin team to approve my code before release, all to do completely routine development changes that required no serious problem-solving. This doesn't mean I'm a 10x developer. It probably means I'm a 1x developer, so a 'true' 10x developer would have been 100x more productive without the aforementioned bureaucratic crap. At these companies that would dogmatically follow Agile and had two week sprints, I might spend four hours, across two days, actually developing -- with the rest of the days filled with various meetings, interviews, waiting for QA/DBA/sysadmins, fucking around, etc. I could easily see how someone could spend only 15 minutes on what took me four hours, and his solutions would likely be more elegant. It doesn't matter -- the limiting factor isn't the development time, or even the development quality. In that environment, there is literally no difference in productive gains between a proficient developer and a 10x developer. Given a "10x developer" is literally defined by his productivity/quality, if you think they're effectively overhyped/nonexistent, ask yourself this: are you in an environment where a 10x developer could actually demonstrate 10x productivity? At most companies, the answer is no, because a 10x engineer is doing in hours what takes people days, and nobody notices. But in the right environment, the 10x engineer will do in weeks what would take proficient engineers months, or do in months what would take years. They're the people that Steve Yegge calls "Done and Gets Things Smart"[0] or that Rands calls "Free Electrons"[1]. And if you work at a company that can't think in terms of months because it's always concerned about quarterly earnings, then they have no use for 10x developer, and chances are you couldn't even tell if one was even there. [0] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things... [1] http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electron.html http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electr...
- georgemcbay 14y agoIn my experience there are both. There are certainly a fair number of 1/10ers that manage to progress through seemingly normal career paths as programmers despite not being very good. I've worked with some, and most of you who are also developers probably have as well. But there are also for-real 10xers on top of the baseline. John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Fabrice Bellard, et al. If you define hyper-productive programmers like those guys as your baseline then like 99.9999% of working programmers need to quit in shame.
- acchow 14y ago> But there are also for-real 10xers on top of the baseline. John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Fabrice Bellard, et al. Those are the famous ones. Also, a fair portion of Members of Technical Staff (and higher) at Google are 10x.
- reeses 14y agoI think you're spot on. There are some _really_ bad programmers out there. Many are stuck in IT departments in non-technical companies, pounding out RPG, COBOL, BASIC, and other "maintenance" work that consists of writing reports. They take weeks doing it. It's a 9-5 job that they don't have to think about when they go home. I sat in a kickoff meeting with a client's development staff. The staff had an average of eleven years of employment in the department. They were starting to define an SDLC for their organization and the topic of code reviews came up. One of the major points of contention for the day was the use of GOSUB over GOTO. (The pro-GOTO people were talking about a bug that smashed the stack, but didn't know it.) It's safe to say these people are not reading "Hacker News", even in its current form, at 10pm. They read ESPN.com at work. Even within this sort of environment, individual effectiveness follows the 1/10 to 10x distribution. There are developers who change one line of code, with a clear specification, and take entire facilities out of production for days. Others get in at 7am, leave at 7pm, and work on ripping out as much code as possible to create reusable modules of...BASIC. Most plod along in the middle.
- vishvananda 14y agoI think the problem is that the author has normalized his development standard to proficient coders in the tech industry. I used to do enterprise software in the midwest and there are legions of 1/10th developers out there. Its easy move your baseline far away from the average when you are in the echo-chamber of high-tech startups. Compared to the true average developer there are definitely 10x developers.
- MBCook 14y agoI think the author's point was we should start calling a spade a spade. Stop calling the 1/10th developers normal baseline and admit that even thought they may be the majority of developers, that doesn't mean we should accept that as the status quo. I imagine this phenomenon is common in most professions. They are tons of accountants and arborists out there. I wonder if they have the same ratio of 'able' to 'efficient', or if some professions are better or worse.
- hluska 14y agoI once had a professor who remarked that if you have a large enough population, the distribution of their skills will form a normal distribution. The difference is that, in some fields, the difference between a genius and a dud is much smaller than others.
- RockyMcNuts 14y agoIf you ask me to design a programming language, I'm a 0 and van Rossum and Kernighan and Ritchie are some finite number, so they are infinity-x me. There are levels where people hit a wall. Some hit it at hello.c, some hit it at writing professional business logic with proper data structures, some hit it at assembly language or programming language design or operating systems. Anyone in over their head at any level is a 1/10 or a 0. The superstars of language design, if they had to dive into Java business logic, might be at 2x the productivity of a competent pro...or they might shoot themselves. But if you create a Python or Linux...what's your productivity compared to that Java programmer? In terms of the market value of those ecosystems, increased efficiency by the developers and users in those ecosystems, it's not 10x, it's gigantic, millions of times the value-add. The weird thing is, people don't get paid much more when they move from one level to another, unless they start the next Google or get shares/royalties...it's more on a log scale.
- jaimebuelta 14y agoGive you some credit. If you had to design a programming language, you'll end with something. You'll have to learn a lot of stuff in the way. Maybe the result won't be awesome, but it will be something, not just 0 ;-)
- reeses 14y agoNO! You're not a 0 at designing a programming language. If you look at modern C++, you may think that it's impossible to design that language. TBH, I'd be incredibly surprised if the current standard is implemented on all of the major compiler platforms before the next standard is released. Remember one of the most important rules in programming and problem solving in general. If you can't see how to solve a problem, break it into n smaller problems. Repeat as needed until you have a problem you can see how to solve and solve that problem. You don't need to know lex/yacc, ANTLR, LLVM, recursive descent, LALR(1), or any of that crap to design a language that will be useful for you. They'll give you leverage and have incredible value, but I assure you that you have the ability, today, to design and implement a programming language if you can program at all. It may not be a general purpose language, but look at languages with minimal syntax, such as forth or a very simplified lisp/scheme. Start by recognizing strings, categorize those strings into your language keywords and program values, and make the computer do something based on the combination. Start with a program that can do something like "print hello" and work from there. You can even add comments by looking for a "#" and ignoring everything from there to the end of the line. You're on your way from there. Do not hold yourself back by thinking any problem that other people can solve is intractable. The main advantage for more experienced developers is that they can think in abstractions and assemble those abstractions into a solution. Sorry for the emotional intensity. Sorry also for ignoring the rest of your comment, as it's relevant. But I care more about your mindset than the argument. You're better than a 0 even if it's just because you understand that you do not yet know something.
- kefeizhou 14y agoYou can't give 10x or 1/10 labels without context. If you ask a smart developer to code in a brand new language, he'll look like a 1/10 developer for a while; and an average developer can look like a 10x developer if he's working with technology that he's been using for the past 10 years.
- orangethirty 14y agoI'm not a 10x programmer. Probably will never be. I do know of programmers who not only are slower in shipping, but are very bad at designing coherent programs and data structures. That's my main observation. It's not that I'm X times better, its that they are X times slower and make poor design choices. Why? My experience has shown that this tends to happen with people who stop keeping up to date and stop learning. Let's take my current job, for example. I'm working with a Python program designed to interact with 2 other programs. It is a middleman. The input comes in as text files, and the output goes out as text from a SQL query. The two programmers who built the system I'm working with (one from IBM, another from NASA, believe or not) had never heard of XML, or JSON. Every data structure inside the system is handled by reading and slicing around the contents of the text files. Slow, error prone, and tedious. My first step was to clean this up. I now have a small script that takes the input data text file and turns it into JSON. Since this data comes from an outside vendor, I don't get to pick the format (though I'm developing an API to handle this). After cleaning the data and saving it as JSON, I then simply load up the JSON file into memory and go through the program flow without issues. I removed the size of the program to about 25% of its original size. Plus its way, way faster. I also removed a bunch of database queries that simply did nothing. Was even able to add logging to the program. Anyhow, the crazy part about it is that the actual code was worse. For those who know Python, using global variables for everything is considered pretty bad form. Here is an example that mimics the code base I inherited: #they called lists arrays an_array = [] def foo(array): global bar, global hello, global hi if bar <> 1: print "something" array[0] = hi Yeah. But wait, there's more. There is a web app written in (what else) flat PHP. It handles very critical information, and is plagued with: $foo = $_GET['foo']; sql = "INSERT INTO TABLE.NAME VALUE($foo)"; //not actual SQL They never clean, or sanitize the data. They don't even check if the GET array is empty. It is obvious these two programmers stopped learning. They simply fell into what I call a learning slump. Where all new data simply goes out the moment it goes in. #Like so def new_data(data): return data #Instead of def new_data(data): #process data #insert data into database Yet, I don't want to call myself better, because most people here are better than me. Yet this leaves me with quite a strange view of everything. I'm not a great programmer, but I'm not as bad as those guys who worked at some big name place. Where does that leave me? Who knows.
- ruswick 14y agoI think that any model that bifurcates coders based on skill is absurd; but this description was uniquely outrageous. It assumes that skill is binary, and that there is never any room to improve beyond being a competent developer. If the maximum "level" a developer can attain is 1x, than there is no differentiation between competent and amazing coders. In all honesty, these scales and the terminology which makes reference to them are absurd. There are average developers, there are mediocre developers, and there are excellent developers. People operate within a massive range of skill levels and have both talents and shortcomings. Trying to express ability as a binary determination made against an arbitrary baseline simply doesn't work.
- jared314 14y agoAll the articles about "10x" developers, "1/10" developers, or "super" developers have not taught me anything about how to improve my skills, or a team's skills. Even the articles that promote the "10,000 hours" or "Just F'ing Do It" mantra feel like proselytizing without practical, or proven, methodologies.
- papsosouid 14y agoArticles are not intended to teach you, they are intended to attract attention to their authors. If you want to learn about productivity in software development, read peopleware.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoDevelopers is one thing, but how about sysadmin work? I think I've seen it there, too. I looked at the tickets worked by a group of people from June 1 to December 15 of a year far in the past. The counts looked like this: 119 348 353 409 515 559 572 634 722 779 830 1004 1029 1169 1345 1487 2096 That's a total of 13970 tickets closed by 17 techs. If you split it evenly, that's 821 each, or about 5.8%. The lowest tech only handled 0.85% of the load. The highest tech handled 15%! If you use the extremes, that's a 17x difference. It also means the top tech did almost 2.5x the "fair share" load of 5.8%. Now, to be clear, tickets are not fungible. One ticket may be simple and another might take days to finish. Still, when there's that much of a difference, odds are the person at the top is doing all of them regardless of the complexity. That's the only way to find enough things to do.
- NateDad 14y agoMy wife worked with a guy who closed a ticket about closing tickets. If you're measured purely on the basis of number of tickets closed, you can game the system. Replaced users mouse, ticket closed. Or, upgraded network software on 300 machines, ticket closed. If someone is doing twice as many tickets as the next guy, I'd assume he is doing a lot of BS work, not that he's twice as fast.
- flyt 14y agoDon't forget: open 300 tickets, one for each machine.
- wildwood 14y agoAnd also be sure to be "that guy" who insists that every single request be made into a ticket, instead of handling simple walk-ups informally.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoWell, yeah, that's why I said tickets aren't fungible. Still, when you have someone hopping on them as quickly as they're opened while someone else just grabs one every hour or two, something is wrong. What if I told you the "one every hour or two" person was doing the dumbest, simplest ones, while the top tech was doing the hardest ones (in addition to everything else)? It happened.
- bluedino 14y agoIt doesn't take much time wasted on Twitter, HN, or chatting up co-workers of the opposite sex to turn into a 1/10x developer
- alttab 14y agoSo are you saying if you are a man, that talking to a woman makes you a 1/10x developer? Or am I missing something?
- InclinedPlane 14y agoOf course there are developers that are vastly more productive and effective than others, this is true of every industry, not just developing. Consider two different developers. One designs and implements a highly useful feature which gives their product a key competitive edge in the market and does so in a way which is elegant, efficient, and robust. The other implements a poorly thought out feature that is a borderline bug even if implemented to spec, takes a long time implementing it, and eventually produces code that is hard to understand and full of defects, sucking up tons of developer time and slowing down development velocity as it soaks up resources every time it needs to be fixed. The difference is not merely one of a 10x productivity imbalance, it's a huge effectiveness difference on the scale of thousands or even millions of times. Looking for "10x productivity" developers is a side-show, it's treating software like factory work. Look for developers who can work more effectively. Developers who you can rely on to deliver a product that is absolutely better along every axis than the competition. Developers who won't just pump lines of code into the repo but who will actively work to improve the quality of the code base over time and increase the total development velocity of the company. Developers who will take the time to look at the internal processes and tools that the company uses and seek to improve them when necessary. Developers that will serve as strong mentors to other developers on the team, and improve their quality as well. And too developers who will be looked up to and admired and will serve as a reason for why other developers enjoy working at the company.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI find this a challenging read. If the guy isn't cutting it in the position he is in, then its reasonable to ask him to move on, but I like to believe that everyone can improve, just as I believe not everyone wants to improve. In my career I've seen developers who were 'average' become way above average after their boss left. This was due to the weird psychological box their manager had managed to get them pinned into. A friend of mine who is now a VC told me about dogs which were put into a box where anything they did caused the floor to shock them. Eventually they just lay on the floor quivering. This sounds horrible and cruel (and it is) and sadly I've seen managers do the same things to their people. Every time they try to do something they get yelled at, and never with any guidance just a "don't do that again!" sort of shock from the floor. Eventually they can't do anything. It is hard to rehabilitate those people but it is possible. It takes a bit of patience to get their confidence back up that they can in fact be excellent contributors. But boy is it painful. Both for them and their new manager. The bottom line for me is that people work at different speeds and different levels. When their tasks are well matched to their strengths they do well. I once characterized two folks I knew as a 'bubble sort' kinda guy and an 'insertion sort' kinda guy. Strangely the bubble sort guy could write code really really quickly, and that was good because he took a long time to arrive at a solid solution. The insertion sort kinda guy worked more slowly and methodically but still got to the solution in about the same amount of time. If you looked at their commit histories you might thing the insertion sort kinda guy was a 1/10th developer but if you look at the milestone delivery rate you'd see he was just as productive as the bubble sort kinda guy. Not a particularly deep insight that people are different I know.
- CoreDumpling 14y agoA friend of mine who is now a VC told me about dogs which were put into a box where anything they did caused the floor to shock them. Eventually they just lay on the floor quivering. This sounds horrible and cruel (and it is) and sadly I've seen managers do the same things to their people. Every time they try to do something they get yelled at, and never with any guidance just a "don't do that again!" sort of shock from the floor. Eventually they can't do anything. This was a study done by Seligman et al and is known as a psychological phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness Scarily, even mentioning this brings flashbacks of when I was part of an entire team that was ruined by it. The pattern that emerged was that a particular senior architect who had the ear of management was perceived as the 10X contributor, even though the misdirection and hostility from him reduced the rest of the team to 1/10 productivity. Most of the other developers were entirely capable but realized the complete futility of their efforts in the face of this kind of management.
- agentultra 14y agoI'm rather tired of this, "developer productivity," rhetoric. It places software developers on a scale that allows micro-managers to perceive people as cogs in a machine. And I don't think that is fair given that we are all capable people. Each one of us will experience times when we are very productive and deeply inspired while other times we will struggle with completing trivial and meaningless tasks. To put ourselves in such absolute figures is disingenuous.
- ownagefool 14y agoI'd in no way claim I'm a 10x developer. Hell I question whether I am a 1x developer, but it's not really as simple as that. First of all the notion that 10x doesn't exist is sorta crap. This may come across as pretty shocking but I don't dedicate every waking moment to development. There is an expectation from many people that being a developer is a 24/7 job and a lot of kids buy into that. If someone spends 10x the effort of me because they honestly feel their career is more important than the rest of their life, then I wouldn't be suprised if they were considerably more productive. I like to think effort correlates to intelligence and skill but I guess it isn't that simple either. Many people learn certian things, while I choose to focus on others. In the end we may emerge somewhere in the middle but everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Thus whether you're 10x more productive than me depends on the domain of knowledge which we're utilising. Folks judge productivity differently. Sadly this often comes from a managment perspective which relates directly to the speed the thing they wanted first appears to them as usable. That's fairly logical from their point of view, but we all know it's folly. Personally I live in a world of duracell bunnies coding up a mess without any thought of security of maintainability. More often than not management tend to believe they're more productive but in reality they just make everyones life harder in the long run. Finally it comes down to motivation. I'm working a crud app for day rates, I'm in no rush. That's not to say I draw it out longer than it should take but I work my hours at a reasonable pace then I go home. Give me an interesting problem and maybe a vested interesting in completing it and I'll work harder and work on it at home. Suddenly I may be that 10x developer you were talking about afterall, though I'm probably not going to spend my entire life like that. Personally I think it's pretty silly to propagate the myth that people are useless if they aren't as quick as others. Sure the scale is huge, but the real problem is people aren't rewarded based on their value but based on crappy metrics like "market rates". Next up is even if management were willing to reward based on value, it's actually very difficult for them to do in the vast majority of cases.
- zeteo 14y agoThese discussions are worse than useless. People with made-up numbers confront people with unreliable anecdotes. Productivity means, very simply, an average of X widgets per hour. Does such a measure even exist for developers? The discussion can apply to such varied situations as: - how fast can a developer add new features to a system they built themselves - how fast can they add features to a system designed by somebody else - how fast do they fix simple bugs - how fast do they find horribly complicated bugs - how fast can they architect a reliable, multithreaded backend - how fast can they work with program management to design a good UI etc. etc. etc. These are often conflicting requirements. People who develop a very elaborate personal coding style will be fast on single projects, but slow to work with other people's code. Those who are methodical and question all assumptions will find hard bugs much sooner, but waste time on simple bugs. Those who can construct elaborate systems in their head often have trouble tweaking hundreds of little CSS details for a single ticket. So I would venture that, for any pair of moderately experienced developers, it's almost always possible to find a pair of tasks such that one of them is twice (or even ten times) as fast as the other. Let's not even bring up how much the incentive structure can vary, even among people in the same department. The example that the article brings is terribly vague and uninstructive. Is that guy, for his whole life, going to be a "1/10 developer"? We never get an idea why he was slow in the first place. Was he lazy? incompetent? concentrating on his studies instead? not motivated by the incentive structure? risk averse because breaking the system carried harsher personal consequences than developing it excruciatingly slowly? The author doesn't even figure out the roots of the problem in the one case he's familiar with, and purports to give advice to everyone else based on it...
- davidwoof1 14y ago> So I would venture that, for any pair of moderately experienced developers, it's almost always possible to find a pair of tasks such that one of them is twice (or even ten times) as fast as the other. I completely disagree. The FizzBuzz syndrome is very real: when I do developer screenings, the majority of candidates simply can't program even tiny problems. There's no way they're faster than anybody on my team at any development-related task. And yet, they all have long resumes and a lot of experience. All those people are working someplace. And I've watched these 1/10 developers at work: they copy/paste lots of code, program through trial and error, and spend most of their time in the debugger. Eventually, stuff gets done, but excruciatingly slowly. Once you reach a certain level of competence, then I think what you're saying is true. But there's a huge number of developers who don't reach that level. On the other hand, I agree with you about this article. Some sort of insight on where this dev spent his time might have been interesting. Whenever I read things this vague, articles based on vague impressions rather than any hard metrics, I'm left wondering which side was actually incompetent here. Maybe this was one of the 1/10 CTOs, completely incapable of effectively communicating with people who don't fit his favored personality type. And if the feature the dev was working on was replaced with something else that only took 30 minutes to implement, maybe the original design was simply unworkable.
- anuraj 14y agoIrrespective of languages (verbose vs non verbose), I have found that the rate at which I code on a normal 8 hour day is 500 LOC of medium complexity code including testing effort - and it has not changed for a long time.
- joeld42 14y agoWhy can't both be true? If you actually had some objective measure of programmer skill, wouldn't you expect there to be some kind of bell curve of skilled programmers, with 10x and 0.1x people somewhere at the tails?
- bumbledraven 14y agoAre we to suppose that Fabrice Bellard, Steve Wozniak, and John Carmack are merely proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain?
- michaell2 14y agowell, the latter two of them seem to have created their domains from scratch, back in the day. Now that they are done with the trailblazing and lots of other smart people crowded in, who knows where they stand in comparison to the right tail of the bell curve.
- Uchikoma 14y agoFrom my recruiting experience and from asking around others who do programming during recruiting, there are 30% programmers that can't program even simple problems (FizzBuzz, String reverse)
- keefe 14y agoif progress in software dev is limited by bottleneck problems that stop progress or slow it to a crawl, then large multipliers in productivity are possible and limited by the scale of the problem...
- dschleef 14y agoIs a 10x developer the same as a "10 star" developer?
- hurtmyknee 14y ago"You can tell when someone 'gets' it and when someone doesn't." Can someone explain this in more detail please?
- khitchdee 14y ago"but the difference between developers who are proficient at what they do will never be a x10 multiplier - it will be closer to a variation of 30-40% in productivity" If you look at individual productivity you're right, but the effect of the myhthical 10x developer is not just on their own work but on the work of others in the project. You could in some cases get a 10x at the project level. It's the difference between working smarter versus surface level efficiency such as better time management.
- kamaal 14y agoNot sure what to make of this post. I'm a 10x guy when it comes to Java/Python/Perl. And I'm also 1/5 guy when it comes to something like a executing a large C project[Which I'm currently working on in my spare time in the nights, totally apart from my day job]. Actually I was 1/10 guy a while back. I'm now at 1/5. I give it another 6 months while I be the 1x guy. And it will take some years when I will hit 10x mark when it comes to C. However this 1/10, 1 or 10x metric is bull crap. There a lot of people who work slowly and steadily and then come to speed. There are a lot of people who learn by making mistakes, there are people people who take time figure out things and go at their own speed. My metric of measuring is how to check how much committed the person is, are they deeply into it, are they serious about it, how much effort do they put in. To they persist on their effort despite problems? If they do, you have a winner. Doesn't matter if he can't understand the C syntax or takes a while. Its worth while to give such candidate some time. Because sooner or later they turn out of be awesome.
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- zeeg 14y agoIf there are 1/10 developers, there are, in fact 10x developers. Guys, math and stuff. In all seriousness, there's a lot of things being done in the productivity and quality spaces to try and mine data to measure things. I recently joined tenXer (.com) which is trying to both drive productivity measurements as well as quality indicators. We by no means have any answers, but I think things have evolved a lot in the recent years to where bringing real measurements is becoming a possibility. I think the important thing here is to realize that measuring people is not solely for someone to manage you differently. You can't succeed in something if you don't have a reasonable success metric, and data makes it far easier to capture those.
- shubhamjain 14y agoIsn't it obvious that people who use dual monitors, take time to set up projects, one step builds, thonl before coding, think about their work be more productive then who don't. What I feel is productivoty isn't magical which a programmer has, it is driven by how much obsessed the programmer is in increasing it ( too much obsession wont be great though ).
- colomon 14y agoWhat you're describing (not counting dual monitors, which is a complete non-sequitur IMO) is just basic competence. When people are talking about 10x, it is more a matter of knowing what to do and how to do it. As a simple example, consider implementing a shuffle from scratch. The inexperienced programmer will muddle about with loops and random statements, a few false starts, and probably after a morning or so will end up with something that is slower than necessary and perhaps not quite as random as it should be. The experienced programmer will say "Fisher–Yates shuffle!" and have a top-in-class implementation ten minutes later. The 10x programmers I've known were experienced like that in seemingly everything. I'm pretty sure I'm an above average programmer, yet I could routinely save myself hours of work by consulting with them for five minutes...
- shubhamjain 14y agoIsn't it obvious that people who use dual monitors, take time to set up projects, one step builds, thonl before coding, think about their work be more productive then who don't. What I feel is productivoty isn't magical which a programmer has, it is driven by how much obsessed the programmer is in increasing it ( too much obsession wont be great though ).
- banachtarski 14y agoWhat's the difference so long as it remains true that some developers are 10 times better than other developers?
- nimblegorilla 14y agoHaving a hard time buying this theory especially given the article's anecdotal evidence. If someone spent 2 weeks trying to program something that took him 30 minutes that is over a 100x improvement.
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- avenger123 14y agoA lot of this comes down to the company itself. Let's just put it out there. If you are working for a consulting company (let's just name the big ones - Accenture, IBM Global Services, Fujitsu Consulting, etc..) it is NOT in the best interests of the company for their developers to be a "10x developer" or even a "1x developer". Usually these companies have set an expectation on how fast development will go. If its big government projects, icebergs might move at a faster pace than development. Working as an employee or even on contract on some of these projects, you learn pretty quick what the "pace" needs to be. These companies don't make their money by doing the speediest development.
- gcatalfamo 14y agoso what do i have to do to shift from 1/10 to 1x ?
- dchichkov 14y agoI think the author was just plain wrong in his decision assigning that transition task to that developer: """ They were just in the middle of a transition from a homebrewed framework into a popular open-source one, which I was intimately familiar with. The author should have been transitioning the application to the new PHP framework himself. He is intimately familiar with it (and only it?), after all. And that other guy probably should have been assigned some other task, that he could be efficient at. Or let go. Instead, it looks like this other guy was assigned a task in which he would be very inefficient, and then micromanaged by newly hired CTO. So no surprise that it ended in that huge time waste.
- contingencies 14y agoIf you don't have your existing coding team involved in the interview process for new people, then you are looking for trouble. The net cause is either your own poor processes and resource allocation (ie. bad hire) or weird internal procedures/standards (overwhelmingly difficult for newcomers to grapple with). Anyway, '10x your tier of productivity'-style elitism is pointless. People will always either accept new colleagues or get shirty ... there is no objective metric for the infinite range of potential human foibles. That said, removing someone too early could easily prove a loss ... often people who think differently are a 100x asset. If you can influence an important resource allocation decision with interesting information, then saving both a month's time and the potential alternative productivity for a bunch of fellow developers could easily pay for a hire's first few. Software's complex, mmkay. Humans are even worse. Chill, we are all flawed creatures :) </first-bottle-of-red>
- nnq 14y agoBecause nobody wants to be called or to call himself a 1/10 developer! It's goddamn demeaning! And we're all at different points on the learning curves for different technologies, so we are all "1/10 developers" for some techs! But if you get the "1/10 developer" label for a technology that you end up working with but you've never touched before so you're running in the "learn on the job" mode, some will tend to mindlessly generalize this and you'll end up with a "1/10" label on your head, and you never want that, especially if you're also freelancing or doing independent consulting and your "fame" has financial consequences!. You just label the pro/experienced/uberproductive guys as 10x and leave the others to learn and perfect, it has the same "positive" effect that having a "like" button and not a "dislike" one (or both) has on social networking sites. (Now , having "learn on the job" guys working at 1/10 productivity is horrible for the customer, but this is how it works and how you get paid for learning instead of paying for learning by going to a top notch university and/or crawling through badly paid internships - as wise men said, "paying customers get shafted every now and then", but this is how we keep learning and keep our jobs fun :))
- cunac 14y agoIf you are consultant it is implied that you are at least proficient in technology/tools you are using and learning on the job in that case is quite frankly immoral. Especially if you are not uprfront with your client about your suitability for job.
- rejschaap 14y agoThis is interesting, but I feel the author did not get to the meat of the issue yet. He suggest to relabel the 10x to 1x and 1x to 1/10x. Which to me just leads to a discussion about whether the glass is half empty or half full. I think the interesting question is, why is it that 1x is generally regarded as default while 10xers are regarded as special.
- okamiueru 14y ago[ ] What separates the 10x devs from the 1x? (what _is_ it? Environment, skill, ...) [X] 10x productivity myths (why you shouldn't believe it) [ ] 10x productivity truths (but, but, it IS true, see?) [ ] Be the 10x developer (aspiring to be one) [ ] Startup perspective (should startups try to acquire 10x devs?) [ ] Why the 10x notion pisses me off (why it shouldn't matter) [ ] If 10x productivity why not 10x salary? (or similar) [X] Some meta discussion on the metrics of "productivity" (solve for x) [ ] Technologies/Languages/Tools/Methodologies that facilitate/impede 10x? [ ] 10x in other professions?
- HNLogInShit 14y ago"10x developer" is just the made-up term of the week. Real people aren't talking about this, because it's bullshit. People love to pretend they're somehow in the know by making shit up. Go out and do something useful instead.