5 ms·

The Nonsense of 10X Developers and GitHub as a CV

74 points by wfaler 12y ago

thebiglebrewski 12y ago
First comes a typo in your article in the second sentence: "though I fear they where actually real conversations"
moe 12y ago
Who is "codequalified.com" and why should I listen to him? There's no author name on the post, in fact there's no name on the entire site. Even the Domain is registered anonymously (DomainsByProxy). I don't care for names anyway, but there's no links to any external identity or previous work either. All I see is an anonymous PR blog, seemingly trying to stir some random internet controversy for backlinks.
- coolsunglasses 12y ago
  Probably https://twitter.com/wfaler/status/535194588886339585 https://twitter.com/wfaler/status/535194588886339585
- fabulist 12y ago
  Who is moe? Knowing someone's name is not a requirement for assessing the quality of their argument, and whether their observations match your own.
tsotha 12y ago
>Yes, relative skill and productivity between programmers can vary wildly, but I would posit that most of the difference you see between organisations ability to deliver software has nothing to do with how many “10X developers” you have hired and everything to do with culture. That doesn't jibe with my experience at all.
- wtracy 12y ago
  Peopleware actually covers a study where standardized programming assignments were handed out to developers for them to take back to their offices and complete. The programmers were asked to time how long it took to complete these tasks. There was dramatically more variance in completion time between organizations than within any one organization. BTW, the book is worth reading.
  - jeremiep 12y ago
    It could merely be because different organizations have different hiring standards and cultures and usually gather the same types of people.
- therealwill 12y ago
  Agreed. I once worked with a programmer that took 3 months to figure out how to send a socket message... She had "30 years" of programming experience and refused to let me help her.
  - wfaler 12y ago
    It's pretty easy to be "10x" (or infinity) someone who clearly doesn't know what they are doing. However, assuming some minimum baseline of having a clue, the multiplier is more likely to be due to environment. Banks hire some very smart people, yet are historically aweful at delivering software. Startups, especially outside SV often have to survive by hiring "scraps" for peanuts, yet run rings around big corps. If a company forces people to work with their hands tied behind their backs, they shouldn't be surprised results are lacking.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      >However, assuming some minimum baseline of having a clue, the multiplier is more likely to be due to environment. I don't think this is true. It's quite common to have a huge productivity variance between people on the same team.
    - wvenable 12y ago
      > However, assuming some minimum baseline of having a clue What does having a clue mean though? Being able to code a loop? Fizzbuzz? SQL? Google for stuff? Architect a small program, a medium program, or a large program? There's a huge variation in cluefulness -- which is entirely the point.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      That's just a lack of experience talking? There are many opportunities in a large project to get stuck or go down a blind alley. Even folks with a clue can do it. Someone who avoids these pitfalls can get far more done. You will inevitably meet one of them in time.
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
      Minimum clue level? How about the minimum level is "the level a lot of developers are making a professional living at". It's incredibly low. I've personally done things in a week that previous developers had spent several months on, and I had no particular domain knowledge. And I feel some other folks are far better than me. So the entire range could possibly be 100x. I've had small coding issues where one dev takes a path that costs them an hour or so, and another is able to deliver the same functionality in minutes. I've seen projects where some developers simply say " I've no idea on even how to start such a project ", and other developers sit and think, read, and end up delivering. That's far more than 10x. Environment may be huge, but it's blatantly false to say there is not a massive, order of magnitude difference between individuals. Unless you define developer as meaning within a certain competency bracket. At which point it's only true on definition.
dalke 12y ago
The summary of the issue by gnat at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good.. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good.... is quite good. I find McConnell's argument on "10x" (as a shorthand for "4x-20x") more defensible, and distrust the modality argument made by Bossavit, though Bossavit has additional reasons for why 10x is inappropriate. Unless there's been new research in the last 4 years or so, I don't think there's anything more to say about this topic than what those two have written.
- thelucky41 12y ago
  That link has some good references and conclusions based from data. There is a very likely chance that professional programmers can have an impact that is many times that of their colleagues. The original article is the author's anecdotal evidence that a 10 times difference in productivity is caused by environment. It's enough to generate a hypothesis, at least. After reading a few of the references, I've found it's even harder to generate good data for this than I expected. It would be of no surprise to me that environment is a large confounding factor on what generates these "10x" programmers.
AReallyGoodName 12y ago
Having no open source projects to show off = nothing special. Having projects to show off = something that makes you stand out. There's no way around this. I can understand why people haven't got open source projects to their name and that's fine but that doesn't change the fact that those that do will look better in interviews.
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  Have you measured this assertion in anyway? I'm not making a claim one way or the other, but what I have found is that people's perceptions about what is indicative of good candidates is rarely what is actually indicative and data goes a long way to dispel/confirm myths.
  - sheepmullet 12y ago
    The problem is we don't have data on the candidates we don't hire.
    - kasey_junk 12y ago
      I agree that the negative's are a very difficult case, but in my experience is that most people don't cover the easier case of candidates they can evaluate. Further, evaluation techniques themselves are pretty error prone. But without collecting data and experimenting with it, how do we improve the problem?
    - danudey 12y ago
      But that means that you don't actually know if this extra signal of quality (or at least, notability) has any value at all. That tells me that you shouldn't be including it in your analysis of a candidate if you don't know what it actually represents.
  - AReallyGoodName 12y ago
    Will you accept an anecdote? The following very simple project has helped me immensely. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/281msj/fast_offline_reverse_geocoding_java_library/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/281msj/fast_off... It's taken me from working in an obscure company on an obscure project into being at least somewhat heard of in the specific field. People are using this in lots of projects and it's been ported to many other languages. It's opened up networking with others in the field and in interviews I've had people state "yeah we looked at your code, it's really clean and efficient".
drivingmenuts 12y ago
People asking for code samples from me run up against the NDAs that I've worked under (code never to be seen by anyone else) or that I don't really care about the code that I write for me and don't bother storing it on github.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- TwoWheelWonder 12y ago
  I think you're conflating the notion of value and productivity. I'd argue value is far more subjective than productivity is. i.e. Facebook is maybe worth $200 billion today, but with a change in the market may only be worth $100 billion tomorrow. Whereas productivity (lets say some ratio of features, bugs, time) is more objectively measured and less volatile.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - TwoWheelWonder 12y ago
      All I can say to that is that if you value value than assessing productivity is not for you.
- kabdib 12y ago
  It's unclear if Facebook's success depends (at all) on the choice of implementation language (beyond picking an obvious loser, which C is not, in the right hands).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
bobloblawblah 12y ago
I do agree with the author that a 10x environment is required for a 10x programmer. I was a 4x-5x programmer at my last position relative to my co-workers. However, I was fired after I tried to take my government legislated vacation entitlement after 3 months notice (and after the employer lost the right to dictate when I could take the vacation). The threat of firing also came with a promotion without additional pay. Bureaucracy, & labour violations in the pursuit of profit has created a <1x environment. Mine is somewhat of an extreme case, but anyone will lose any motivation to outperform without commensurate pay/recognition.
- wvenable 12y ago
  I don't think it automatically follows though that 10x environment leads to 10x programmers. I have now, in my career, come into perfectly fine organizations where hardly anything got done. A serial history of 0.2X programmers in an environment that didn't limit them. So I completely disagree with the premise of the article. The 10X programmer exists and environment, while a factor, isn't the only factor.
  - bobloblawblah 12y ago
    That's not what he is saying. His header is: "There is no such thing as a 10X developer (without a 10X environment)." It's p->(q is possible), not p->q.
    - wvenable 12y ago
      From the article: "Let’s first start with the mythical 10X developer: there is no such thing."
      - wfaler 12y ago
        Case of "I'm going to pick the sentence I like the least out of its context and argue against that"?
        12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
JazCE 12y ago
So much truth spoken
aidenn0 12y ago
This reads like "There is no such thing as a fast car, only fast racetracks." Surely it takes both?
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  Maybe, but most of the studies (I'm thinking of Peopleware's examples) indicate that the environment is the dominant factor and the difference in people is mostly noise.
  - sheepmullet 12y ago
    Do they really though? Have they consistently shown you can take the developers in a bad environment and put them in a good one and they will be as productive? I don't think so. I think they have simply shown that certain environments are horrible for productivity.
- UnixHakr 12y ago
  Definitely. Using that same analogy you can't properly assess how good a race car is if you take it out to some muddy field and do laps with it. But yes, inversely your 88 Chevy Corsica isn't going impress anyone at Nurburgring.
sheepmullet 12y ago
Environment and culture certainly play a big role in developer productivity. You can do a lot with average. That being said in any kind of large organisation changing the culture is 100x harder and slower than hiring better developers. IMO, building/creating 10x programmers in your area of business is simple but it is not easy. - Ensure at least 25% of your developers times are spent on learning and development. - Give them the freedom to work on what they think are the most important tasks to the business (e.g. Something similar to open allocation) - Ensure you are paying your developers at least market+20% in order to minimise turnover so you actually get something out of creating 10x'ers. Now go and try and change a large organisations culture to be like the above. I'll wait.... And wait... And wait
UnixHakr 12y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this article in it's entirety, however there is one thing I agree with. Environment matters. The environment created will make an all the difference. And it's not things like beer and ping pong tables, it's respect for employees and encouraging an environment of collaboration. It's about making your developers excited to be working for you. This seems like common sense, but in my 15 years I've only worked for a handful of companies that really "get it" to some degree and there is always a higher amount of productivity there.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Oh wait, a recruiting firm is dissing the data which makes recruiting firms less useful? I am not surprised. Sadly one of the most influential things I've found on how successful a developer will be at a company is how they like to interact at work and how the folks at work prefer to interact. And that is something recruiters can't search for.
- secstate 12y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I've watched folks come and go in the various jobs I've had, and aside from one very painful case, most of them moved on due to cultural incompatibilities and not incompetence. I feel like the "Github is not a CV" posts are about as tired as the "Why I'm leaving X" posts at this point. Honestly, if the place you're applying doesn't want your Github account, they wont ask for it. If they do they will. There's no right answer here. Me, personally, I love using Github as a CV because it saves me the banality of trumping up my chest feathers and getting ready for a show that a resume/CV requires and lets me keep working on things that I'm curious about.
infinitone 12y ago
The article basically died after saying stuff like: >Spring Framework is undoubtedly one of the most popular software libraries/frameworks in the history of mankind, yet it is an abominable bag of fail and poor engineering. Typically when you say something like that, you'd actually know what you are talking about enough to state concisely and easily your reasoning.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
"Productivity" is the wrong metric to measure for developers anyway. Development is not a factory job, developers aren't cranking out widgets on an assembly line and developers who crank out more widgets aren't somehow superior to those who crank out fewer. What matters is the value of what devs have created, and that's almost impossible to measure objectively in many cases, with some occasional exceptions. That often takes a lot of work and usually requires someone who is also highly skilled making a subjective judgment. I complete agree with the author here, hiring and culture is hard, and most of the time that fact is ignored and the result is failures on both counts. Taking the time and effort to be good at either is usually a huge competitive advantage. It's similar to software. Does your product solve easy problems or hard problems? If you only solve easy problems, how do you expect that to keep you ahead of the competition? Determining the talent of a developer is not an easy problem in the general case, and if you only hire the developers that are easy to hire you're probably doing it wrong.

74 points by wfaler 12y ago

First comes a typo in your article in the second sentence: "though I fear they where actually real conversations"

moe 12y ago

Who is "codequalified.com" and why should I listen to him? There's no author name on the post, in fact there's no name on the entire site. Even the Domain is registered anonymously (DomainsByProxy). I don't care for names anyway, but there's no links to any external identity or previous work either. All I see is an anonymous PR blog, seemingly trying to stir some random internet controversy for backlinks.

coolsunglasses 12y ago
Probably https://twitter.com/wfaler/status/535194588886339585 https://twitter.com/wfaler/status/535194588886339585
fabulist 12y ago
Who is moe? Knowing someone's name is not a requirement for assessing the quality of their argument, and whether their observations match your own.

tsotha 12y ago

>Yes, relative skill and productivity between programmers can vary wildly, but I would posit that most of the difference you see between organisations ability to deliver software has nothing to do with how many “10X developers” you have hired and everything to do with culture. That doesn't jibe with my experience at all.

wtracy 12y ago
Peopleware actually covers a study where standardized programming assignments were handed out to developers for them to take back to their offices and complete. The programmers were asked to time how long it took to complete these tasks. There was dramatically more variance in completion time between organizations than within any one organization. BTW, the book is worth reading.
- jeremiep 12y ago
  It could merely be because different organizations have different hiring standards and cultures and usually gather the same types of people.
therealwill 12y ago
Agreed. I once worked with a programmer that took 3 months to figure out how to send a socket message... She had "30 years" of programming experience and refused to let me help her.
- wfaler 12y ago
  It's pretty easy to be "10x" (or infinity) someone who clearly doesn't know what they are doing. However, assuming some minimum baseline of having a clue, the multiplier is more likely to be due to environment. Banks hire some very smart people, yet are historically aweful at delivering software. Startups, especially outside SV often have to survive by hiring "scraps" for peanuts, yet run rings around big corps. If a company forces people to work with their hands tied behind their backs, they shouldn't be surprised results are lacking.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    >However, assuming some minimum baseline of having a clue, the multiplier is more likely to be due to environment. I don't think this is true. It's quite common to have a huge productivity variance between people on the same team.
  - wvenable 12y ago
    > However, assuming some minimum baseline of having a clue What does having a clue mean though? Being able to code a loop? Fizzbuzz? SQL? Google for stuff? Architect a small program, a medium program, or a large program? There's a huge variation in cluefulness -- which is entirely the point.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    That's just a lack of experience talking? There are many opportunities in a large project to get stuck or go down a blind alley. Even folks with a clue can do it. Someone who avoids these pitfalls can get far more done. You will inevitably meet one of them in time.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Minimum clue level? How about the minimum level is "the level a lot of developers are making a professional living at". It's incredibly low. I've personally done things in a week that previous developers had spent several months on, and I had no particular domain knowledge. And I feel some other folks are far better than me. So the entire range could possibly be 100x. I've had small coding issues where one dev takes a path that costs them an hour or so, and another is able to deliver the same functionality in minutes. I've seen projects where some developers simply say " I've no idea on even how to start such a project ", and other developers sit and think, read, and end up delivering. That's far more than 10x. Environment may be huge, but it's blatantly false to say there is not a massive, order of magnitude difference between individuals. Unless you define developer as meaning within a certain competency bracket. At which point it's only true on definition.

dalke 12y ago

The summary of the issue by gnat at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good.. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good.... is quite good. I find McConnell's argument on "10x" (as a shorthand for "4x-20x") more defensible, and distrust the modality argument made by Bossavit, though Bossavit has additional reasons for why 10x is inappropriate. Unless there's been new research in the last 4 years or so, I don't think there's anything more to say about this topic than what those two have written.

thelucky41 12y ago
That link has some good references and conclusions based from data. There is a very likely chance that professional programmers can have an impact that is many times that of their colleagues. The original article is the author's anecdotal evidence that a 10 times difference in productivity is caused by environment. It's enough to generate a hypothesis, at least. After reading a few of the references, I've found it's even harder to generate good data for this than I expected. It would be of no surprise to me that environment is a large confounding factor on what generates these "10x" programmers.

AReallyGoodName 12y ago

Having no open source projects to show off = nothing special. Having projects to show off = something that makes you stand out. There's no way around this. I can understand why people haven't got open source projects to their name and that's fine but that doesn't change the fact that those that do will look better in interviews.

kasey_junk 12y ago
Have you measured this assertion in anyway? I'm not making a claim one way or the other, but what I have found is that people's perceptions about what is indicative of good candidates is rarely what is actually indicative and data goes a long way to dispel/confirm myths.
- sheepmullet 12y ago
  The problem is we don't have data on the candidates we don't hire.
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    I agree that the negative's are a very difficult case, but in my experience is that most people don't cover the easier case of candidates they can evaluate. Further, evaluation techniques themselves are pretty error prone. But without collecting data and experimenting with it, how do we improve the problem?
  - danudey 12y ago
    But that means that you don't actually know if this extra signal of quality (or at least, notability) has any value at all. That tells me that you shouldn't be including it in your analysis of a candidate if you don't know what it actually represents.
- AReallyGoodName 12y ago
  Will you accept an anecdote? The following very simple project has helped me immensely. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/281msj/fast_offline_reverse_geocoding_java_library/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/281msj/fast_off... It's taken me from working in an obscure company on an obscure project into being at least somewhat heard of in the specific field. People are using this in lots of projects and it's been ported to many other languages. It's opened up networking with others in the field and in interviews I've had people state "yeah we looked at your code, it's really clean and efficient".

drivingmenuts 12y ago

People asking for code samples from me run up against the NDAs that I've worked under (code never to be seen by anyone else) or that I don't really care about the code that I write for me and don't bother storing it on github.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

TwoWheelWonder 12y ago
I think you're conflating the notion of value and productivity. I'd argue value is far more subjective than productivity is. i.e. Facebook is maybe worth $200 billion today, but with a change in the market may only be worth $100 billion tomorrow. Whereas productivity (lets say some ratio of features, bugs, time) is more objectively measured and less volatile.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - TwoWheelWonder 12y ago
    All I can say to that is that if you value value than assessing productivity is not for you.
kabdib 12y ago
It's unclear if Facebook's success depends (at all) on the choice of implementation language (beyond picking an obvious loser, which C is not, in the right hands).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

bobloblawblah 12y ago

I do agree with the author that a 10x environment is required for a 10x programmer. I was a 4x-5x programmer at my last position relative to my co-workers. However, I was fired after I tried to take my government legislated vacation entitlement after 3 months notice (and after the employer lost the right to dictate when I could take the vacation). The threat of firing also came with a promotion without additional pay. Bureaucracy, & labour violations in the pursuit of profit has created a <1x environment. Mine is somewhat of an extreme case, but anyone will lose any motivation to outperform without commensurate pay/recognition.

wvenable 12y ago
I don't think it automatically follows though that 10x environment leads to 10x programmers. I have now, in my career, come into perfectly fine organizations where hardly anything got done. A serial history of 0.2X programmers in an environment that didn't limit them. So I completely disagree with the premise of the article. The 10X programmer exists and environment, while a factor, isn't the only factor.
- bobloblawblah 12y ago
  That's not what he is saying. His header is: "There is no such thing as a 10X developer (without a 10X environment)." It's p->(q is possible), not p->q.
  - wvenable 12y ago
    From the article: "Let’s first start with the mythical 10X developer: there is no such thing."
    - wfaler 12y ago
      Case of "I'm going to pick the sentence I like the least out of its context and argue against that"?
      - 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

JazCE 12y ago

So much truth spoken

aidenn0 12y ago

This reads like "There is no such thing as a fast car, only fast racetracks." Surely it takes both?

kasey_junk 12y ago
Maybe, but most of the studies (I'm thinking of Peopleware's examples) indicate that the environment is the dominant factor and the difference in people is mostly noise.
- sheepmullet 12y ago
  Do they really though? Have they consistently shown you can take the developers in a bad environment and put them in a good one and they will be as productive? I don't think so. I think they have simply shown that certain environments are horrible for productivity.
UnixHakr 12y ago
Definitely. Using that same analogy you can't properly assess how good a race car is if you take it out to some muddy field and do laps with it. But yes, inversely your 88 Chevy Corsica isn't going impress anyone at Nurburgring.

sheepmullet 12y ago

Environment and culture certainly play a big role in developer productivity. You can do a lot with average. That being said in any kind of large organisation changing the culture is 100x harder and slower than hiring better developers. IMO, building/creating 10x programmers in your area of business is simple but it is not easy. - Ensure at least 25% of your developers times are spent on learning and development. - Give them the freedom to work on what they think are the most important tasks to the business (e.g. Something similar to open allocation) - Ensure you are paying your developers at least market+20% in order to minimise turnover so you actually get something out of creating 10x'ers. Now go and try and change a large organisations culture to be like the above. I'll wait.... And wait... And wait

UnixHakr 12y ago

I'm not sure I agree with this article in it's entirety, however there is one thing I agree with. Environment matters. The environment created will make an all the difference. And it's not things like beer and ping pong tables, it's respect for employees and encouraging an environment of collaboration. It's about making your developers excited to be working for you. This seems like common sense, but in my 15 years I've only worked for a handful of companies that really "get it" to some degree and there is always a higher amount of productivity there.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Oh wait, a recruiting firm is dissing the data which makes recruiting firms less useful? I am not surprised. Sadly one of the most influential things I've found on how successful a developer will be at a company is how they like to interact at work and how the folks at work prefer to interact. And that is something recruiters can't search for.

secstate 12y ago
I couldn't agree more. I've watched folks come and go in the various jobs I've had, and aside from one very painful case, most of them moved on due to cultural incompatibilities and not incompetence. I feel like the "Github is not a CV" posts are about as tired as the "Why I'm leaving X" posts at this point. Honestly, if the place you're applying doesn't want your Github account, they wont ask for it. If they do they will. There's no right answer here. Me, personally, I love using Github as a CV because it saves me the banality of trumping up my chest feathers and getting ready for a show that a resume/CV requires and lets me keep working on things that I'm curious about.

infinitone 12y ago

The article basically died after saying stuff like: >Spring Framework is undoubtedly one of the most popular software libraries/frameworks in the history of mankind, yet it is an abominable bag of fail and poor engineering. Typically when you say something like that, you'd actually know what you are talking about enough to state concisely and easily your reasoning.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

"Productivity" is the wrong metric to measure for developers anyway. Development is not a factory job, developers aren't cranking out widgets on an assembly line and developers who crank out more widgets aren't somehow superior to those who crank out fewer. What matters is the value of what devs have created, and that's almost impossible to measure objectively in many cases, with some occasional exceptions. That often takes a lot of work and usually requires someone who is also highly skilled making a subjective judgment. I complete agree with the author here, hiring and culture is hard, and most of the time that fact is ignored and the result is failures on both counts. Taking the time and effort to be good at either is usually a huge competitive advantage. It's similar to software. Does your product solve easy problems or hard problems? If you only solve easy problems, how do you expect that to keep you ahead of the competition? Determining the talent of a developer is not an easy problem in the general case, and if you only hire the developers that are easy to hire you're probably doing it wrong.