8 ms·

The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

74 points by yadazula 13y ago

bostik 13y ago
I would have preferred somewhat more content, but the article still had this absolute gem at the end: > it's diversity of thought and experience in a team that makes a Rockstar Team People who complement (and cover) one another's skills, are mostly self-directing and are not afraid to ask "stupid" questions - they are incredibly valuable, together more so than as individuals. I've had the joy of working with/in such teams twice in my career. Problems didn't just vanish, they very rarely materialised. Eventually all good things must end. Projects end, priorities change, people move on and teams get disbanded. The reality check after such a joyful experience can be shocking.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
In the same vain I responded to Shanley's post: this is missing one type of engineer that is common in our field: * Average Engineer - Creates complex problems in response to simple problems... This is where the desire for rockstars / 10x engineers comes from. One person to clean up the mess made by 10 others.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  That's exactly what I thought as well. I'd very much prefer having the 10x engineer meme replaced by that of the 0.1x engineer: the one that gets the same task done with 10% of the code and effort. The times I've felt by far most valuable is when I found a way to make that multi-month project simply obsolete by just changing a couple hundred lines of code in an unexpected place.
  - skrebbel 13y ago
    I've seen engineers with consistently negative productivity: solve 1 bug by introducing 2.
  - Someone 13y ago
    See also: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_O...: "In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code. He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."
- jebblue 13y ago
  Vain should be vein like vein or ore or artery.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
benjaminwootton 13y ago
He's empirically wrong because I've worked with 10x developers. A few years ago I worked with a guy there whose output, productivity, and smart solutions combined with godlike C++ coding ability made him probably 100x more effective than anyone else in the place. This was in the front office at Goldman Sachs, so the rest of us weren't completely useless. He was just in a different league though. I have also worked with a 10x developer who carried a small company of around 50.
- xophe 13y ago
  I understand where you're coming from -- there are some truly good engineers out there. But I think he's right too. He's essentially arguing about the true meaning of the metric. Of course there are engineers who can spot bugs at 1/100th the time as an arbitrary engineer. Or fixes things 10x faster (being familiar with the code base certainly helps). But to have the literal productive capacity of 10 people? That's much different, and that's what he means. Are you capable of replacing 10 arbitrary engineers with the rockstar? No? Then that's not a 10x engineer, by his definition.
  - dspeyer 13y ago
    It's rare that anyone tries to replace 10 ordinary engineers with one 10xer. It's common, however, to try to replace one 10xer with 10 ordinary engineers, and find that they can't cope with the challenges.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  > He's empirically wrong because I've worked with 10x developers. I believe you meant "He's anecdotally wrong because I've worked with 10x developers." To be empirically wrong, you'd have to contradict it with some empirical rather than anecdotal evidence.
  - derleth 13y ago
    Anecdotal evidence is empirical evidence. It's just not very convincing because it doesn't come with any information about how common experiences like those are, or what confounding factors might be at play. Now, in this case, confounding factors probably aren't a problem, but if 10x developers are one in a million or one in a billion, an anecdote about how someone, somewhere actually met one once isn't very helpful to the rest of us.
illumen 13y ago
Allow me to retort: Fabrice Bellard, Linus Torvalds, John Carmack.
- jmadsen 13y ago
  Pity...go to any job board, you'll see 50 of them needed on any given day Those aren't the "rock stars" hiring companies are talking about. They don't need & couldn't afford Linus. Rock star is just a label they slap onto the job description.
  - ak39 13y ago
    >Rock star is just a label they slap onto the job description ... ... often to arouse the ego of possible candidates. I can't imagine why any recruiter wouldn't see the deliberate attempt at patronising candidates when they advertise "Looking for a Rock star programmer." Oh, hang on ... I know why: appealing to and strongly arousing ego is one of the quickest way to get responses. The team matters more than the individual. Hiring with overt calls to rock stars is surely going to damage communication and collaboration with the current team.
- _random_ 13y ago
  So they are all self-employed. Makes much more sense than a salaried genius. Shouldn't we discuss 10x managers as well?
Paul_S 13y ago
Collaboration overhead. If you replace 10 average programmers with 1 good programmer he doesn't need 10x productivity to match the combined productivity of 10 programmers (which is not a sum). On top of that, programming productivity is also a qualitative measure that goes beyond feature X working correctly. One person can code it in such a way that every time it needs changing it's easy to work with - thus saves uncountable hours in the future. Not all men are created equal - I don't see why anyone would rail against that. Some people are stronger than you, some people are better coders than you - it's OK. Compare yourself with last year's you instead.
- forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
  "Some people are stronger than you, some people are better coders than you - it's OK. " What some people fail to get is that coders have over human powers. A strong person can't surpass human limits. He can't lift a car with his hands. But a person with a machine can. You can't short all the words in a book as a person, but a machine can in less than a tenth of a second.
  - friendstock 13y ago
    Typo. Should be: You can't SORT all the words...
    - camperman 13y ago
      Maybe he really meant to reply to the Goldman Sachs comment :)
      - friendstock 13y ago
        :)
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
I disagree strongly. I created a software company, I have an amazing team, I know a little about this. Rockstars programmers exist and they do because they can do machines do work for them, instead of having five people do the work the can do the code 5x to 100x or 1000x faster. They could automate almost everything, even coding(creating new languages when needed specially for the task) and debugging itself, creating testing code, making failures very hard to happen. A normal programmer will create new problems, not solve it. She will put mechanisms in place in order for the company to depend on her. She could not be faster but she could certainly make the others to slow down to her level. Beware is she gets to manage Rockstars, she will do everything to put others down, pointing fingers. They are experts excuse makers. If you look at all big software accomplishments you will discover a very small team of incredible rockstar developers. What this man is saying is that you need a team, no divas. But who says that Rockstars can't create teams? One thing you can't do of course is putting Rockstars at the orders of some mediocre person or even argue when you don't know what you are talking about(you need to do your homework first). It is not comfortable. What this person is saying is that he fears managing a team of people smarter than him, so he just prefers having people that are "normal".
- XorNot 13y ago
  "Normal", really? This sounds more like you have a hiring problem.
- weland 13y ago
  If you think you're hiring abnormal developers, you either have a very distorted view of your candidate pool, or your hiring process borks somewhere in the middle. There is at least one faulty assumption in your post; I don't think it disqualifies it, of course, but I believe it makes it hard to generalize your conclusion: > they do because they can do machines do work for them, instead of having five people do the work the can do the code 5x to 100x or 1000x faster. They could automate almost everything, even coding(creating new languages when needed specially for the task) and debugging itself, creating testing code, making failures very hard to happen. First off, the "they make machines do work for them" is a cliche. Please, don't use this to advertise your team. Unless it's a bunch of freshmen doing 100% quality original web design on freelancer.com. Second, if most of your development process can be automatized, why exactly do you need a team of developers? Original work tends to require thinking and crafting. If you're cranking out Joomla websites and a hundred customized CRMs a month, sure, that works, but most of these mythical rockstar creatures would probably not touch one of those things. What about processes that naturally don't lend themselves to being automatized, particularly like the DSLs you mention? Yes, you can automate some of the process (e.g. you can use flexx and yacc to generate some of the parsing logic) if the language is too complex to reliably code the respective parts by hand, but you're still a long way to go from there. > A normal programmer will create new problems, not solve it. She will put mechanisms in place in order for the company to depend on her. She could not be faster but she could certainly make the others to slow down to her level. This is not what a normal programmer does. If the programmers you normally hire are like this, your company has a serious problem.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
It doesn't take a "rockstar" or a "ninja" or "guru" or what-have-you to be a significantly above average developer. Often the biggest hindrance to product quality (including performance, reliability, and usability) as well as to development velocity is technical debt. Having a team member who consistently churns out lots of new stuff of excellent quality is great but not nearly as important as someone who is sensitive to and adamant about eliminating technical debt. The cost of such debt balloons exponentially over time and becomes more and more difficult to pay down the longer it's allowed to grow. But even a fairly modest amount of effort consistently applied before technical debt grows out of hand can realize massive gains compared to the more typical scenario where the technical debt is allowed to grow until it threatens the viability of the entire product before it's addressed. This may not seem very "rockstar" but ultimately it is such folks who keep the system clean who have the most disproportionately large impact on the quality, viability, market success, and total development cost of big projects.
- UK-AL 13y ago
  Its the guys who layout the overall design, making it is easily extensible and not prone technical debt who make a software project. They may not be the most productive in producing code, but they allow others to be so. It's usually the same guy going over others peoples code, and reducing technical debt.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Another thing, a lot of the most important work in development is relatively unglamorous. Most of the time it's better to have a craftsman at work than a diva steering your product in the wrong direction for the sake of looking cool in the moment.
bjornsing 13y ago
Isn't it obvious that the myth or reality of the 10x engineer has a lot to do with what the engineer is supposed to do? Say that the engineer has to independently develop the general theory of relativity to solve a problem, then I'd say Einstein would have been about Inf times more productive than the average engineer at solving that particular problem. If on the other hand it's the usual "migrate this crap code from that crap platform to this shiny new golden one" kind of work, then you'd have more of a bottleneck in how fast you can push the buttons on the keyboard... You can't talk about productivity without defining the task, and software engineering is a field with extraordinary span in the difficulty of tasks.
sliverstorm 13y ago
My main takeaway from the rockstar/ninja programmer thing- many people seem to believe that the average programmer produces net negative value, i.e. causes more problems than they solve. I'm still uncertain whether I believe this, although I'm sure we all feel like we are carrying the team some days. If it were true, it would mean that firing half of all programmers could be the biggest improvement to the software industry ever seen.
arbuge 13y ago
>>People love to say that a rockstar can do the work of 10 regular engineers. That's just nonsense. 9 women can't have one baby in a month, and 10 "rockstar" developers can't replace 100 regular ones. A somewhat confusing attempt to use the 9 women analogy here - it doesn't prove the author's point in any way. I've worked with rockstar coders and engineers and my empirical experience suggests he's wrong.
dexen 13y ago
After reading numerous posts on the subject of 10x software engineers, I reckon they fall mostly into two categories: - `I have worked with / seen code of such ones' (often examples follow) - `there were no such ones on any team I ever managed', with OP falling into this category. Which is to say, the existence (or absence) of 10x software engineers appears to be party recognition problem -- managers do not want to believe one `rockstar' is responsible for most of team's output. The other part, is the sampling bias: managers don't get to work with the Torvalds, Bellards, etc. Such software engineers often don't need to be, or aren't managed while producing their most important code. Neither they do respond to ``we are hiring rockstars'' types of job ads...
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  There also seems to be some ideological motivation for claiming rockstars don't exist. The existence of rockstars provides fodder for individualist ideologies. Many people are more collectivist, so therefore feel the need to dispute the existence of rockstars. This is a little bit evident here - you need a rockstar team, with diversity. It's far more evident in the last post on this same topic. (Not quite a dupe, but it might as well be. https://medium.com/about-work/6aedba30ecfe https://medium.com/about-work/6aedba30ecfe ) Amusingly, it's also a very corporate philosophy. "No programmer is worth more than any other, therefore to advance you must enter management." Tends to be self selecting in such corporations, since everyone who isn't mediocre leaves.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
    > No programmer is worth more than any other I don't think that's what's being said. IMHO the message is: - No programmer is worth 10x the average. (though some might be worth 1/10 * the average). - A high-functioning team is more important than a high-functioning individual, and these two are sometimes at odds if you give free rein to the "individualist ideologies". Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "No programmer is worth more than any other", i.e. "all programmers have exactly the same worth" is not Hanselman's point. It is an corporate anti-pattern. "each person has different strengths and weaknesses and is growing at their own rate" is recognised implicitly in a healthy working environment. Whether management gets it or not.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Jugurtha 13y ago
Well, you can't get into electronics and not hear about Bob Widlar, Jim Williams or Bob Pease.. There is such a thing as rockstar engineer. The thing they had in common though was that they're really good, yet are kind on others. They were also extravagent, but that's just who they were. Read about how Jim Williams behaved during his interview, and you'd see what I mean (for the less curious, he was in shorts and sandals, moved really close to the recruiter and started to interrogate him).
frostmatthew 13y ago
Each time something like this is posted to HN many are quick to come to the defense of the 10x engineer as not a myth. Since so many HNers are founders/CEOs/CTOs/whatever I wonder how many of them making comments that 10x engineers are "responsible for most of team's output" are actually paying their "rockstar" engineers ten times average. The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of a Hollywood film makes far more than most actors, and true "rockstars" make a heck of a lot more money than the vast majority of musicians. Anyone know any companies that pay their best engineers multi-million dollar salaries? (if so please let me know where to apply!)
- dexen 13y ago
  > The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of a Hollywood film makes far more than most actors, and true "rockstars" make a heck of a lot more money than the vast majority of musicians. It's sales and risk management problem. Given a rockstar and an aspiring novice rocker, you can sell concert tickets at 10x (or 100x) price mark when the former plays. The costs of infrastructure are high, but scale roughly with O(log(n)) which means econonmy of scale, and being rockstar means automatic, `free' marketing. It works a little bit different in the software world. If you sell to corporate customers, it's sales and risk management (support, compatibility, etc.) problem. You need those costly sales reps. Due to risk management, corporation pay only slightly more for 10x better if it is built by small team -- they want a large, established vendor (risk management on their part). Which obviously pre-cludes all-star team. Unless you hit an acquisition jackpot :^) If you sell software packages to consumers, it's marketing and margins problem -- there is always a middleman taking a cut; think Apple Store. Unless you become viral -- like Angry Birds did. If you sell services to consumers, it's again marketing and scaling problem -- you'll end up needing huge backend, which means large team, which agains precludes an all-star team. > Anyone know any companies that pay their best engineers multi-million dollar salaries? (if so please let me know where to apply!) GOOG, FB, etc. -- to the founders ;-)
- crazygringo 13y ago
  Because it's notoriously difficult to measure programmer productivity, companies are generally going to be incredibly hesitant to offer "rockstar" programmers salaries that match their capabilities. There's no box office take or album sales or stadium-filling metrics to rely on. "Rockstar" programmers generally need to go and (co-)found their own companies to make their multiples of millions. The great difficulty is that being a rockstar programmer doesn't always make you a good product/business person, and the best programming can't save a crappy business. But people like Gates and Zuckerberg are the ones who make it happen. But if one day we find the holy grail of accurately measuring programmer productivity... (though I don't think that's possible...)
d23 13y ago
> Reality is a normal distribution curve. Lots of good average senior developers, some amazing outliers and some junior folks with potential. (and some folks that suck.) Strange, but this doesn't seem to be the case for me, or at least the people that I've had to interview and work with. I've run into far too many developers who have no business installing apache much less making anything of use for a client. I don't consider myself a "rockstar," but when you put me next to one of these folks my productivity is going to be 10-fold better at least. On top of that, the things I build will be reliable and maintainable -- their will be a mess of technical debt that breaks every few days. As a sidenote, I find this obnoxious: > I hate Quora so I won't link to them, but here's a modification of a great answer from Nate Waddoups that was taken from some internal engineering paperwork: "I hate Quora, so I'll just steal their content and post it here."
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > As a sidenote, I find this obnoxious: > "I hate Quora, so I'll just steal their content and post it here." It's not Quora's content. Quora's TOS explicitly states that users retain ownership over their contributions. Quora only gets a non-exclusive license. Scott Hanselman works for Microsoft. Nade Waddoups works for Microsoft, wrote an internal document at Microsoft, and then posted part of it to Quora as an answer. Therefore: The copyright is held not by Quora, or even by Nate Waddoups -- but by Microsoft. And since Scott Hanselman is performing a PR function at Microsoft through his blogging, he has the right to post that content on his blog.
  - shanselman 13y ago
    That's a little complex of an explanation. I could still argue fair use. Regardless, it's a coincidence that this guy works for MSFT. I don't know him. I just stumbled on the Quora post. The link from my post also explains why Quora is evil, I'm detail, FWIW.
ef4 13y ago
The author is exactly backwards on the issue of team scaling. Even if I grant his premise that 10x engineers don't exist (which I don't), let's just presume 2x engineers exist. So is a team of four 2x engineers equivalent to a team of 8 1x engineers? No -- the smaller team is vastly more effective, because of the n^2 communication problem. This is why strong individual performers are so valuable. Give me my top pick of 10 developers, and we will ship the product at least as fast as any organization of any size. Bigger organizations can still work on more separate projects in parallel, but they won't out-develop us on any particular one.
- dennisgorelik 13y ago
  "n!" communication problem, not just "n^2".
rob05c 13y ago
In my experience, Managers often mistake Cowboy Coders for Rockstars. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoder http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoder
eloff 13y ago
This isn't backed up by evidence or a sound argument, and comparing the capability of women to have babies with the productivity of programmers nicely sums up the intelligence of the argument. Teams follow the 80/20 rule as well. 20% of the developers do 80% of the work (there is actually evidence in support of this, but I'm not going to look it up now) Rockstar developers are a real thing. I work with some. I like to think I am one. I'm not talking about loud developers which the author seems to conflate with rockstar developers. I'm talking about the quiet thoughtful guys who have an amazing grasp of how everything fits together. They see the problem in amazing detail with all it's hairiness and then devise a simple, elegant solution for it. Rockstar developers are the guys who solve the right problems. And there's an infinite gap between them and the bottom guys, because for some problems, the worst developers will never solve them. They tend to be around 10x as productive as above-average developers on the hardest problems. On easy problems there's a much smaller difference. In my free time I work on a multi-threaded high-performance ACID relational database with concurrent algorithms, custom memory allocation and layout, hybrid index data structures and garbage collection algorithms. I don't know too many developers who can solve those kinds of problems, so I like to think I'm special. But all humans like to think that, so maybe I'm not actually a rockstar developer and I'm really just average-delusional. Who knows.
azakai 13y ago
> People love to say that a rockstar can do the work of 10 regular engineers. That's just nonsense. 9 women can't have one baby in a month, and 10 "rockstar" developers can't replace 100 regular ones. This is completely unconvincing, and begs the question: why is software development a sequential fixed-time process like having a baby? Where is the evidence for that? On the other side of things, there are lots of people - just look in the comments here and in previous related stories - of people that clearly say they have worked with devs that are 10x more productive then the average. Why does the author feel the need to deny that? That's the real question.
harel 13y ago
I never liked the words rockstar and programmer being associated together. The only valid use case for that is if a member of a very successful rock band, with fans and groupies becomes a programmer as a second job. Only then he's a rockstar programmer.
skrebbel 13y ago
I suspect that the strong disagreements between people on this thread on whether 10x engineers exist or not say more about the diversity of HN'er team composition than anything else. If you put a competent coder among a bunch of not-entirely-stupid, well willing, but mediocre programmers, he can quickly be 10x as productive. He will also clearly stand out as such. Put the same coder among other competent coders, and nobody will notice anything special. If this is true, there can only be two options: - Hanselman only ever worked with mediocre engineers - Hanselman only ever worked with truly competent engineers. Hm. Given recent stories about Microsoft's employee quality downfall, something about my thesis must be wrong. That, or Microsoft really does mostly hire people in the rightmost quartile of a bell curve. But anyway, no matter whether this idea makes sense, I believe that it never pays to try to hire "10x people". If you find that you managed to find one, it simply means that the most of your team has been underperforming. Get rid of them and replace by one or two other decent ones. Maybe the first mr 10x has some friends?
kens 13y ago
My theory is that the time taken for an engineer to solve a problem is a hockey-stick/exponential curve based on the complexity, something like __/ The key thing is the knee of the curve is in a different position for different engineers. Basically, up to a certain point, you can crank through a problem pretty well. But once problems reach a certain level of complexity you'll slow down. And at a higher level of complexity, you're just going to go in circles and not going to get anywhere. The point of a "rockstar" is not that they are 10x faster on the flat part, but their curve is shifted so they are on the flat part while another engineer would be on the exponential part. In other words "rockstar" depends on the problem. Knuth is unlikely to build a basic CRUD application 10x faster than an average HN programmer, but if the problem is building a typography system, he's probably 100x as productive. Likewise, if I had to build a Javascript compiler engine, a self-driving car, Minecraft, or a translation system, I would be stuck around 0% productivity while a "rockstar" would deliver. But "rockstar" depends on the project: on a simpler project, many more people would be able to deliver well. TL;DR: for a particular project, people who can do that project well are 100x more productive than people who are overwhelmed by the project. But this line moves depending on the complexity of the project.
adamconroy 13y ago
The 10x programmer myth is all about relativity. I suggest there are no 10x programmers, only -10x programmers which make the normal ones look really good. And people who say that 10x programmers do exist because they have worked with one, are in fact themselves the -10x guy.
memracom 13y ago
"In fact, it's diversity of thought and experience in a team that makes a Rockstar Team" -- this, a million times this. You don't get rockstar results without deep thought and questioning everything. The most efficient way to do this, and the easiest way to create this in your company, is to build a diverse team. I believe that this is the real secret behind Google.
pstack 13y ago
The most important reason we have to insist on the "rockstar programmer" being a myth is that it takes attention away from the CEO that wants to be the rockstar. Rockstars also have more leverage, which chaffs the suits who want you to be just another drone that they can shuffle around like an office chair.

74 points by yadazula 13y ago

I would have preferred somewhat more content, but the article still had this absolute gem at the end: > it's diversity of thought and experience in a team that makes a Rockstar Team People who complement (and cover) one another's skills, are mostly self-directing and are not afraid to ask "stupid" questions - they are incredibly valuable, together more so than as individuals. I've had the joy of working with/in such teams twice in my career. Problems didn't just vanish, they very rarely materialised. Eventually all good things must end. Projects end, priorities change, people move on and teams get disbanded. The reality check after such a joyful experience can be shocking.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

In the same vain I responded to Shanley's post: this is missing one type of engineer that is common in our field: * Average Engineer - Creates complex problems in response to simple problems... This is where the desire for rockstars / 10x engineers comes from. One person to clean up the mess made by 10 others.

mtrimpe 13y ago
That's exactly what I thought as well. I'd very much prefer having the 10x engineer meme replaced by that of the 0.1x engineer: the one that gets the same task done with 10% of the code and effort. The times I've felt by far most valuable is when I found a way to make that multi-month project simply obsolete by just changing a couple hundred lines of code in an unexpected place.
- skrebbel 13y ago
  I've seen engineers with consistently negative productivity: solve 1 bug by introducing 2.
- Someone 13y ago
  See also: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_O...: "In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code. He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."
jebblue 13y ago
Vain should be vein like vein or ore or artery.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

benjaminwootton 13y ago

He's empirically wrong because I've worked with 10x developers. A few years ago I worked with a guy there whose output, productivity, and smart solutions combined with godlike C++ coding ability made him probably 100x more effective than anyone else in the place. This was in the front office at Goldman Sachs, so the rest of us weren't completely useless. He was just in a different league though. I have also worked with a 10x developer who carried a small company of around 50.

xophe 13y ago
I understand where you're coming from -- there are some truly good engineers out there. But I think he's right too. He's essentially arguing about the true meaning of the metric. Of course there are engineers who can spot bugs at 1/100th the time as an arbitrary engineer. Or fixes things 10x faster (being familiar with the code base certainly helps). But to have the literal productive capacity of 10 people? That's much different, and that's what he means. Are you capable of replacing 10 arbitrary engineers with the rockstar? No? Then that's not a 10x engineer, by his definition.
- dspeyer 13y ago
  It's rare that anyone tries to replace 10 ordinary engineers with one 10xer. It's common, however, to try to replace one 10xer with 10 ordinary engineers, and find that they can't cope with the challenges.
seanmcdirmid 13y ago
> He's empirically wrong because I've worked with 10x developers. I believe you meant "He's anecdotally wrong because I've worked with 10x developers." To be empirically wrong, you'd have to contradict it with some empirical rather than anecdotal evidence.
- derleth 13y ago
  Anecdotal evidence is empirical evidence. It's just not very convincing because it doesn't come with any information about how common experiences like those are, or what confounding factors might be at play. Now, in this case, confounding factors probably aren't a problem, but if 10x developers are one in a million or one in a billion, an anecdote about how someone, somewhere actually met one once isn't very helpful to the rest of us.

illumen 13y ago

Allow me to retort: Fabrice Bellard, Linus Torvalds, John Carmack.

jmadsen 13y ago
Pity...go to any job board, you'll see 50 of them needed on any given day Those aren't the "rock stars" hiring companies are talking about. They don't need & couldn't afford Linus. Rock star is just a label they slap onto the job description.
- ak39 13y ago
  >Rock star is just a label they slap onto the job description ... ... often to arouse the ego of possible candidates. I can't imagine why any recruiter wouldn't see the deliberate attempt at patronising candidates when they advertise "Looking for a Rock star programmer." Oh, hang on ... I know why: appealing to and strongly arousing ego is one of the quickest way to get responses. The team matters more than the individual. Hiring with overt calls to rock stars is surely going to damage communication and collaboration with the current team.
_random_ 13y ago
So they are all self-employed. Makes much more sense than a salaried genius. Shouldn't we discuss 10x managers as well?

Paul_S 13y ago

Collaboration overhead. If you replace 10 average programmers with 1 good programmer he doesn't need 10x productivity to match the combined productivity of 10 programmers (which is not a sum). On top of that, programming productivity is also a qualitative measure that goes beyond feature X working correctly. One person can code it in such a way that every time it needs changing it's easy to work with - thus saves uncountable hours in the future. Not all men are created equal - I don't see why anyone would rail against that. Some people are stronger than you, some people are better coders than you - it's OK. Compare yourself with last year's you instead.

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"Some people are stronger than you, some people are better coders than you - it's OK. " What some people fail to get is that coders have over human powers. A strong person can't surpass human limits. He can't lift a car with his hands. But a person with a machine can. You can't short all the words in a book as a person, but a machine can in less than a tenth of a second.
- friendstock 13y ago
  Typo. Should be: You can't SORT all the words...
  - camperman 13y ago
    Maybe he really meant to reply to the Goldman Sachs comment :)
    - friendstock 13y ago
      :)

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

I disagree strongly. I created a software company, I have an amazing team, I know a little about this. Rockstars programmers exist and they do because they can do machines do work for them, instead of having five people do the work the can do the code 5x to 100x or 1000x faster. They could automate almost everything, even coding(creating new languages when needed specially for the task) and debugging itself, creating testing code, making failures very hard to happen. A normal programmer will create new problems, not solve it. She will put mechanisms in place in order for the company to depend on her. She could not be faster but she could certainly make the others to slow down to her level. Beware is she gets to manage Rockstars, she will do everything to put others down, pointing fingers. They are experts excuse makers. If you look at all big software accomplishments you will discover a very small team of incredible rockstar developers. What this man is saying is that you need a team, no divas. But who says that Rockstars can't create teams? One thing you can't do of course is putting Rockstars at the orders of some mediocre person or even argue when you don't know what you are talking about(you need to do your homework first). It is not comfortable. What this person is saying is that he fears managing a team of people smarter than him, so he just prefers having people that are "normal".

XorNot 13y ago
"Normal", really? This sounds more like you have a hiring problem.
weland 13y ago
If you think you're hiring abnormal developers, you either have a very distorted view of your candidate pool, or your hiring process borks somewhere in the middle. There is at least one faulty assumption in your post; I don't think it disqualifies it, of course, but I believe it makes it hard to generalize your conclusion: > they do because they can do machines do work for them, instead of having five people do the work the can do the code 5x to 100x or 1000x faster. They could automate almost everything, even coding(creating new languages when needed specially for the task) and debugging itself, creating testing code, making failures very hard to happen. First off, the "they make machines do work for them" is a cliche. Please, don't use this to advertise your team. Unless it's a bunch of freshmen doing 100% quality original web design on freelancer.com. Second, if most of your development process can be automatized, why exactly do you need a team of developers? Original work tends to require thinking and crafting. If you're cranking out Joomla websites and a hundred customized CRMs a month, sure, that works, but most of these mythical rockstar creatures would probably not touch one of those things. What about processes that naturally don't lend themselves to being automatized, particularly like the DSLs you mention? Yes, you can automate some of the process (e.g. you can use flexx and yacc to generate some of the parsing logic) if the language is too complex to reliably code the respective parts by hand, but you're still a long way to go from there. > A normal programmer will create new problems, not solve it. She will put mechanisms in place in order for the company to depend on her. She could not be faster but she could certainly make the others to slow down to her level. This is not what a normal programmer does. If the programmers you normally hire are like this, your company has a serious problem.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

It doesn't take a "rockstar" or a "ninja" or "guru" or what-have-you to be a significantly above average developer. Often the biggest hindrance to product quality (including performance, reliability, and usability) as well as to development velocity is technical debt. Having a team member who consistently churns out lots of new stuff of excellent quality is great but not nearly as important as someone who is sensitive to and adamant about eliminating technical debt. The cost of such debt balloons exponentially over time and becomes more and more difficult to pay down the longer it's allowed to grow. But even a fairly modest amount of effort consistently applied before technical debt grows out of hand can realize massive gains compared to the more typical scenario where the technical debt is allowed to grow until it threatens the viability of the entire product before it's addressed. This may not seem very "rockstar" but ultimately it is such folks who keep the system clean who have the most disproportionately large impact on the quality, viability, market success, and total development cost of big projects.

UK-AL 13y ago
Its the guys who layout the overall design, making it is easily extensible and not prone technical debt who make a software project. They may not be the most productive in producing code, but they allow others to be so. It's usually the same guy going over others peoples code, and reducing technical debt.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Another thing, a lot of the most important work in development is relatively unglamorous. Most of the time it's better to have a craftsman at work than a diva steering your product in the wrong direction for the sake of looking cool in the moment.

bjornsing 13y ago

Isn't it obvious that the myth or reality of the 10x engineer has a lot to do with what the engineer is supposed to do? Say that the engineer has to independently develop the general theory of relativity to solve a problem, then I'd say Einstein would have been about Inf times more productive than the average engineer at solving that particular problem. If on the other hand it's the usual "migrate this crap code from that crap platform to this shiny new golden one" kind of work, then you'd have more of a bottleneck in how fast you can push the buttons on the keyboard... You can't talk about productivity without defining the task, and software engineering is a field with extraordinary span in the difficulty of tasks.

sliverstorm 13y ago

My main takeaway from the rockstar/ninja programmer thing- many people seem to believe that the average programmer produces net negative value, i.e. causes more problems than they solve. I'm still uncertain whether I believe this, although I'm sure we all feel like we are carrying the team some days. If it were true, it would mean that firing half of all programmers could be the biggest improvement to the software industry ever seen.

arbuge 13y ago

>>People love to say that a rockstar can do the work of 10 regular engineers. That's just nonsense. 9 women can't have one baby in a month, and 10 "rockstar" developers can't replace 100 regular ones. A somewhat confusing attempt to use the 9 women analogy here - it doesn't prove the author's point in any way. I've worked with rockstar coders and engineers and my empirical experience suggests he's wrong.

dexen 13y ago

After reading numerous posts on the subject of 10x software engineers, I reckon they fall mostly into two categories: - `I have worked with / seen code of such ones' (often examples follow) - `there were no such ones on any team I ever managed', with OP falling into this category. Which is to say, the existence (or absence) of 10x software engineers appears to be party recognition problem -- managers do not want to believe one `rockstar' is responsible for most of team's output. The other part, is the sampling bias: managers don't get to work with the Torvalds, Bellards, etc. Such software engineers often don't need to be, or aren't managed while producing their most important code. Neither they do respond to ``we are hiring rockstars'' types of job ads...

yummyfajitas 13y ago
There also seems to be some ideological motivation for claiming rockstars don't exist. The existence of rockstars provides fodder for individualist ideologies. Many people are more collectivist, so therefore feel the need to dispute the existence of rockstars. This is a little bit evident here - you need a rockstar team, with diversity. It's far more evident in the last post on this same topic. (Not quite a dupe, but it might as well be. https://medium.com/about-work/6aedba30ecfe https://medium.com/about-work/6aedba30ecfe ) Amusingly, it's also a very corporate philosophy. "No programmer is worth more than any other, therefore to advance you must enter management." Tends to be self selecting in such corporations, since everyone who isn't mediocre leaves.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  > No programmer is worth more than any other I don't think that's what's being said. IMHO the message is: - No programmer is worth 10x the average. (though some might be worth 1/10 * the average). - A high-functioning team is more important than a high-functioning individual, and these two are sometimes at odds if you give free rein to the "individualist ideologies". Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "No programmer is worth more than any other", i.e. "all programmers have exactly the same worth" is not Hanselman's point. It is an corporate anti-pattern. "each person has different strengths and weaknesses and is growing at their own rate" is recognised implicitly in a healthy working environment. Whether management gets it or not.

deleted 13y ago

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Jugurtha 13y ago

Well, you can't get into electronics and not hear about Bob Widlar, Jim Williams or Bob Pease.. There is such a thing as rockstar engineer. The thing they had in common though was that they're really good, yet are kind on others. They were also extravagent, but that's just who they were. Read about how Jim Williams behaved during his interview, and you'd see what I mean (for the less curious, he was in shorts and sandals, moved really close to the recruiter and started to interrogate him).

frostmatthew 13y ago

Each time something like this is posted to HN many are quick to come to the defense of the 10x engineer as not a myth. Since so many HNers are founders/CEOs/CTOs/whatever I wonder how many of them making comments that 10x engineers are "responsible for most of team's output" are actually paying their "rockstar" engineers ten times average. The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of a Hollywood film makes far more than most actors, and true "rockstars" make a heck of a lot more money than the vast majority of musicians. Anyone know any companies that pay their best engineers multi-million dollar salaries? (if so please let me know where to apply!)

dexen 13y ago
> The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of a Hollywood film makes far more than most actors, and true "rockstars" make a heck of a lot more money than the vast majority of musicians. It's sales and risk management problem. Given a rockstar and an aspiring novice rocker, you can sell concert tickets at 10x (or 100x) price mark when the former plays. The costs of infrastructure are high, but scale roughly with O(log(n)) which means econonmy of scale, and being rockstar means automatic, `free' marketing. It works a little bit different in the software world. If you sell to corporate customers, it's sales and risk management (support, compatibility, etc.) problem. You need those costly sales reps. Due to risk management, corporation pay only slightly more for 10x better if it is built by small team -- they want a large, established vendor (risk management on their part). Which obviously pre-cludes all-star team. Unless you hit an acquisition jackpot :^) If you sell software packages to consumers, it's marketing and margins problem -- there is always a middleman taking a cut; think Apple Store. Unless you become viral -- like Angry Birds did. If you sell services to consumers, it's again marketing and scaling problem -- you'll end up needing huge backend, which means large team, which agains precludes an all-star team. > Anyone know any companies that pay their best engineers multi-million dollar salaries? (if so please let me know where to apply!) GOOG, FB, etc. -- to the founders ;-)
crazygringo 13y ago
Because it's notoriously difficult to measure programmer productivity, companies are generally going to be incredibly hesitant to offer "rockstar" programmers salaries that match their capabilities. There's no box office take or album sales or stadium-filling metrics to rely on. "Rockstar" programmers generally need to go and (co-)found their own companies to make their multiples of millions. The great difficulty is that being a rockstar programmer doesn't always make you a good product/business person, and the best programming can't save a crappy business. But people like Gates and Zuckerberg are the ones who make it happen. But if one day we find the holy grail of accurately measuring programmer productivity... (though I don't think that's possible...)

d23 13y ago

> Reality is a normal distribution curve. Lots of good average senior developers, some amazing outliers and some junior folks with potential. (and some folks that suck.) Strange, but this doesn't seem to be the case for me, or at least the people that I've had to interview and work with. I've run into far too many developers who have no business installing apache much less making anything of use for a client. I don't consider myself a "rockstar," but when you put me next to one of these folks my productivity is going to be 10-fold better at least. On top of that, the things I build will be reliable and maintainable -- their will be a mess of technical debt that breaks every few days. As a sidenote, I find this obnoxious: > I hate Quora so I won't link to them, but here's a modification of a great answer from Nate Waddoups that was taken from some internal engineering paperwork: "I hate Quora, so I'll just steal their content and post it here."

tanzam75 13y ago
> As a sidenote, I find this obnoxious: > "I hate Quora, so I'll just steal their content and post it here." It's not Quora's content. Quora's TOS explicitly states that users retain ownership over their contributions. Quora only gets a non-exclusive license. Scott Hanselman works for Microsoft. Nade Waddoups works for Microsoft, wrote an internal document at Microsoft, and then posted part of it to Quora as an answer. Therefore: The copyright is held not by Quora, or even by Nate Waddoups -- but by Microsoft. And since Scott Hanselman is performing a PR function at Microsoft through his blogging, he has the right to post that content on his blog.
- shanselman 13y ago
  That's a little complex of an explanation. I could still argue fair use. Regardless, it's a coincidence that this guy works for MSFT. I don't know him. I just stumbled on the Quora post. The link from my post also explains why Quora is evil, I'm detail, FWIW.

ef4 13y ago

The author is exactly backwards on the issue of team scaling. Even if I grant his premise that 10x engineers don't exist (which I don't), let's just presume 2x engineers exist. So is a team of four 2x engineers equivalent to a team of 8 1x engineers? No -- the smaller team is vastly more effective, because of the n^2 communication problem. This is why strong individual performers are so valuable. Give me my top pick of 10 developers, and we will ship the product at least as fast as any organization of any size. Bigger organizations can still work on more separate projects in parallel, but they won't out-develop us on any particular one.

dennisgorelik 13y ago
"n!" communication problem, not just "n^2".

rob05c 13y ago

In my experience, Managers often mistake Cowboy Coders for Rockstars. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoder http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CowboyCoder

eloff 13y ago

This isn't backed up by evidence or a sound argument, and comparing the capability of women to have babies with the productivity of programmers nicely sums up the intelligence of the argument. Teams follow the 80/20 rule as well. 20% of the developers do 80% of the work (there is actually evidence in support of this, but I'm not going to look it up now) Rockstar developers are a real thing. I work with some. I like to think I am one. I'm not talking about loud developers which the author seems to conflate with rockstar developers. I'm talking about the quiet thoughtful guys who have an amazing grasp of how everything fits together. They see the problem in amazing detail with all it's hairiness and then devise a simple, elegant solution for it. Rockstar developers are the guys who solve the right problems. And there's an infinite gap between them and the bottom guys, because for some problems, the worst developers will never solve them. They tend to be around 10x as productive as above-average developers on the hardest problems. On easy problems there's a much smaller difference. In my free time I work on a multi-threaded high-performance ACID relational database with concurrent algorithms, custom memory allocation and layout, hybrid index data structures and garbage collection algorithms. I don't know too many developers who can solve those kinds of problems, so I like to think I'm special. But all humans like to think that, so maybe I'm not actually a rockstar developer and I'm really just average-delusional. Who knows.

azakai 13y ago

> People love to say that a rockstar can do the work of 10 regular engineers. That's just nonsense. 9 women can't have one baby in a month, and 10 "rockstar" developers can't replace 100 regular ones. This is completely unconvincing, and begs the question: why is software development a sequential fixed-time process like having a baby? Where is the evidence for that? On the other side of things, there are lots of people - just look in the comments here and in previous related stories - of people that clearly say they have worked with devs that are 10x more productive then the average. Why does the author feel the need to deny that? That's the real question.

harel 13y ago

I never liked the words rockstar and programmer being associated together. The only valid use case for that is if a member of a very successful rock band, with fans and groupies becomes a programmer as a second job. Only then he's a rockstar programmer.

skrebbel 13y ago

I suspect that the strong disagreements between people on this thread on whether 10x engineers exist or not say more about the diversity of HN'er team composition than anything else. If you put a competent coder among a bunch of not-entirely-stupid, well willing, but mediocre programmers, he can quickly be 10x as productive. He will also clearly stand out as such. Put the same coder among other competent coders, and nobody will notice anything special. If this is true, there can only be two options: - Hanselman only ever worked with mediocre engineers - Hanselman only ever worked with truly competent engineers. Hm. Given recent stories about Microsoft's employee quality downfall, something about my thesis must be wrong. That, or Microsoft really does mostly hire people in the rightmost quartile of a bell curve. But anyway, no matter whether this idea makes sense, I believe that it never pays to try to hire "10x people". If you find that you managed to find one, it simply means that the most of your team has been underperforming. Get rid of them and replace by one or two other decent ones. Maybe the first mr 10x has some friends?

kens 13y ago

My theory is that the time taken for an engineer to solve a problem is a hockey-stick/exponential curve based on the complexity, something like __/ The key thing is the knee of the curve is in a different position for different engineers. Basically, up to a certain point, you can crank through a problem pretty well. But once problems reach a certain level of complexity you'll slow down. And at a higher level of complexity, you're just going to go in circles and not going to get anywhere. The point of a "rockstar" is not that they are 10x faster on the flat part, but their curve is shifted so they are on the flat part while another engineer would be on the exponential part. In other words "rockstar" depends on the problem. Knuth is unlikely to build a basic CRUD application 10x faster than an average HN programmer, but if the problem is building a typography system, he's probably 100x as productive. Likewise, if I had to build a Javascript compiler engine, a self-driving car, Minecraft, or a translation system, I would be stuck around 0% productivity while a "rockstar" would deliver. But "rockstar" depends on the project: on a simpler project, many more people would be able to deliver well. TL;DR: for a particular project, people who can do that project well are 100x more productive than people who are overwhelmed by the project. But this line moves depending on the complexity of the project.

adamconroy 13y ago

The 10x programmer myth is all about relativity. I suggest there are no 10x programmers, only -10x programmers which make the normal ones look really good. And people who say that 10x programmers do exist because they have worked with one, are in fact themselves the -10x guy.

memracom 13y ago

"In fact, it's diversity of thought and experience in a team that makes a Rockstar Team" -- this, a million times this. You don't get rockstar results without deep thought and questioning everything. The most efficient way to do this, and the easiest way to create this in your company, is to build a diverse team. I believe that this is the real secret behind Google.

pstack 13y ago

The most important reason we have to insist on the "rockstar programmer" being a myth is that it takes attention away from the CEO that wants to be the rockstar. Rockstars also have more leverage, which chaffs the suits who want you to be just another drone that they can shuffle around like an office chair.