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In 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 desp

In 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 ago
I 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.

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 ago

I 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.