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I fell into a role once that was unquely tailored to my experience. To paraphrase, I spent years studying and playing with parsing technologies, and parsing leg

I fell into a role once that was unquely tailored to my experience. To paraphrase, I spent years studying and playing with parsing technologies, and parsing legacy languages for static analysis (these were my side projects). I took a job that required a lot of screen scraping (not really but close) at which I excelled. Blew everyone away when I turned around a project in two weeks. The same type of project took their devs three months on average. To them I imagine I seemed like a 10x'er. They didn't know I'd been writing parsers for fun, for years before that. An example similar to this would be Brendan Eich writing Javascript in 10 days, when he'd been doing language implementations for fun.

antjanus 12y ago
Yep, I've had that happen in a past. And the only reason I was able to tackle that "one problem no other developer could fix" was because I had already tackled it numerous times freelancing. In that case, I was almost a 100x developer.
phkahler 12y ago
Agreed. Got a call from a headhunter for a contract job I was uniquely suited for because of the niche I had been working for 10 years. I needed a change but was quite relatively content so I aimed high with my requirements, got the job, and then slam-dunked it so well someone tried to sabotage my efforts. I also agree with the post that there are a lot of different things to be good at in programming. I tend to be good at some of the ones that are not mainstream, and I tend to suck at some that are mainstream. Sometimes that makes me awesome, sometimes it makes me stupid.