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He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far

He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Anybody who has watched N0tch code on Twitch knows that there are certainly people who are far more productive coders than the average engineer. I have no idea if he's coding 10x faster than I could but it's probably close. And my ego is... healthy sized. But it ignores the truth that few of us work as "programmers." A software engineer has many responsibilities and doing the other things well brings a force multiplier to your work. I personally subscribe to the belief that we all have a superpower or two, and figuring them out and pressing their advantage is a strong catalyst to success. So figure out what you 10x at and be happy for it.

rch 12y ago
> There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" There are still 10x equivalents though. For instance, a PhD MD that chairs a department at a major hospital, publishes significant research, participates in NIH or similar organisations, and still sees patients is going to be a very different sort of professional than your local GP. It's the notion that 10x applies only to NCLOC production that needs rethinking, so you're in the ballpark in that respect.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  But which doctor will give you better care? And which doctor will save more lives, or improve them in a meaningful way? Those are different jobs. Is a security researcher more or less productive than a programmer on a team of 10?
- BrainInAJar 12y ago
  but those 10x equivalents are specialized, and there's absolutely a place for your local GP. Whereas every company is falling over themselves to hire the 10x programmer. A local GP is what you want for tracking your longitudinal health and being a personal interaction with the health care system for you. Not someone chairing a department & publishing research
  - engendered 12y ago
    Whereas every company is falling over themselves to hire the 10x programmer. Is this true? I've been involved in a number of hires over the years where we quite specifically did not want a "10x programmer". We knew the position didn't pay enough, and had enough tiresome, non-novel work (e.g. building data processes for client data. Not big enough or interesting enough to be big data or technically challenging) that we simply wanted, in effect, a marginally competent chair warmer. From seeing hiring and employment practices, this seems to be absolutely common across the industry. Similarly there is another comment that opines that every programmer thinks they're a 10x programmer. Now maybe it's because I have a work history in places like financial firms and banks and insurance and telecom, rather than pure software or Google-esque, but this is absolutely untrue. I found that the vast majority of developers were simply careerists.
IgorPartola 12y ago
It is hard to quantify programmer productivity objectively, but most of us know subjectively when we are productive and when we are not and the difference that can make. If at my baseline I am 1x, at my peak productivity I can easily see myself being at 5-15x. (How this works and how to induce this boost is a separate discussion). I believe others experience what I am talking about. From here it isn't a far leap to think that another developer may just work at that pace naturally all the time. I think this is the basis for the 10x developer mythos. Whether there is a great variation or Notch just recorded himself on days when he felt really productive (or the fact of recording himself made him productive) remains debatable. Then again, I have seen my share of the 1/10x programmers, so it is possible that it is all relative. In either case, like you said, programming a computer is only a part of the job for most people. Gathering requirements, building a product, selling it, supporting it, marketing, all factor in. Otherwise, you might say that all a car mechanic ever does is change the oil.
- collyw 12y ago
  Completely agree. Being able to focus on one thing uninterrupted and I can get a lot written. Sadly that happens very rarely these days.
lsd5you 12y ago
We all have a super power or two (or none or, sometimes more than two ...). Do you not think what you wrote is just liberal dogma? I think there probably are people with few things going for them. Possibly removed from you socially due to the various filters that act on our lives.
- encoderer 12y ago
  Unfortunately you are right. But the people who you speak of, who are without any platform or privilege, are not reading my comment on Hacker News today.
- thesimpsons1022 12y ago
  why liberal?
ars 12y ago
> There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Sure there are. Unlike programming where most of it is unique, and that stuff that's not is widely dismissed as "crud" (create update delete), with Dr's almost all of their work is routine. Except when it's not, and when you have difficult cases you most DEFINITELY have 10x Dr's. Have you never heard stories of patients going from Dr. to Dr. trying to figure out what's wrong with them, until they find that one genius Dr. who finally figures it out? And regarding blogging, that's what the entire series of columns on NYT called "Think like a Doctor" is!
- Someone 12y ago
  "Have you never heard stories of patients going from Dr. to Dr. trying to figure out what's wrong with them, until they find that one genius Dr. who finally figures it out?" Part of that is throwing die after die until a six comes up. The die that gives a six need not have _anything_ to do with it.
comrade1 12y ago
It's not a matter of coding 10X times faster than another coder. It's a matter of coding to not put yourself into common traps/pitfalls that waste your time trying to get out of. And also to make the correct decisions/strategies early in the project to put it on a track that uses the correct tools, libraries, etc. that won't waste your time later. A junior developer is almost always a net negative on a team of developers as the other developers end up having to fix their code. (one doesn't hire junior devs for their productivity but instead to train them to the point where they're no longer a net negative). If you extrapolate it further, there are developers that have so much diverse experience and think at a higher level than others that their time brings 10x time to the project than even other experienced developers.
- Arwill 12y ago
  What i commonly notice is if a developer starts solving the problem at its core, and then builds the interfaces around it, or he starts writing "utility" code, like writing code in hope that the problem will solve itself if enough helper code (or framework code) has been written for it. When i see a developer doing the latter, i know he will not be too productive, because he has no clear vision of the solution.
  - nn3 12y ago
    You're dismissing bottom up programing. That is actually a wide used technique, especially useful when the problem is not completely understood at the beginning.
    - _asummers 12y ago
      It is also useful as a refactoring technique. Pulling common structures and patterns out to helper code often reveals the true structure of the existing code, which makes the end result easier to see.
      - lugg 12y ago
        .. That is, provided you refactor again afterward to put things into the correct abstractions. I call this pulling out into helper code function "blowing up" the code, because it usually results in an order of magnitude larger amount of lines of code. This refactoring technique certainly helps make the core logic of the (usually) over complicated program visibly easier to see / grok from a distance. From there its just a matter of reducing / refactoring / simplifying things down to more correct (at least I hope) abstractions that don't overcomplicate the solution. This is most useful when you're given something like a 5k line script that does far too many things for far too many different reasons, all with very little if any documentation. (ie, bottom up refactoring, don't really know what the solution is but you know the current solution isn't the way to go)
nerfhammer 12y ago
It's greed really - everyone wants to hire 10x engineers, but it's not like you're going to pay them 10x of course.
- _yosefk 12y ago
  Well, if you pay 10x for 10x more productivity you don't gain much, do you?.. Can't blame 'em for not bothering to look for a rarity for no gain.
  - greenyoda 12y ago
    If one person can really do the work of ten, you can save money on overhead: - Fewer managers - a group of 10 will probably require a programming lead who spends some fraction of their time not coding. - One tenth the amount of office space and hardware. - Only paying for one person's health insurance instead of ten peoples'. - Vastly reduced communications overhead - a team of 10 people is going to spend a lot of time communicating with each other to insure that everyone is doing what they need to be doing. So I'm guessing you'll come out ahead even if you do pay ten times more for ten times the productivity. But companies rarely even pay twice as much for a developer who is exceptionally productive. The downside of having one person doing the work of ten is that it's a disaster when the person decides to quit - it's the equivalent of a whole team of people simultaneously quitting.
    - _yosefk 12y ago
      Well, yeah, if you actually pay <10x when all is counted but get an actual 10x more, then you will have gained, but grandparent said "they won't pay 10x for 10x." My tongue is in my cheek or some other such place right now because I kinda find this 10x business a bit funny, given that we can't even roughly quantify productivity. The thing I do believe in is that some people fit some kinds of work so well that it's silly to consider many other seemingly similarly qualified people as a practical alternative; as in, a hammer is good at hammering and it's not a question of it being 10x better than a shoe or 5x, it's just silly to hammer with a shoe, just don't do it. This is obvious but if phrased as "hammers are 10x shoes", it loses its obviousness and gains ridiculousness.
dhimes 12y ago
Lev Landau used to rate physicists on a log_10 scale, so the idea extends to (and perhaps started with?) physics. EDIT: grammar
crag 12y ago
I love to write code. And it's about 20% of my job. As an engineer, I spend most of my time in design (and meetings). The code is the fun, relaxing part. Many times, I don't even write code; I "review" code. We have "grunts" (younger programmers, usually) who pump out code all day. They're are involved in design too, of course. But in a very limited way. But you know, I think all of this comes with age. If you 22 years old, fresh out of school, you are going to be writing code all day. And that's how it should be, You need to cut-your-teeth. Also, one last thought, just being a [overly] productive programmer doesn't make you a good programmer. I'd rather someone take there time, be comfortable and get it right. But I have met that rare bird, who is confortable writing code 18 hours a day.
- Fiahil 12y ago
  > If you 22 years old, fresh out of school, you are going to be writing code all day. And that's how it should be, You need to cut-your-teeth. I'm 22 years old, fresh out of school and I'm as involved in design, recruiting and peer reviews as my older peers. And that's how it should be. Why? Because age has nothing to do with productivity, understanding or ability to come up with simple, elegant and maintainable designs.
  - mediascreen 12y ago
    While age might not have anything to do with productivity, experience definitely has. Especially when it comes to recognizing which problems are worth solving and giving (appropriate) pushback to product owners and managers.
  - nickynix 12y ago
    Experience has a lot to do with productivity, understanding, and the ability to come up with simple, elegant, and maintainable designs. The "22 years old, fresh out of school" programmer is more pointed at the inexperienced individual rather than age itself. I would say the same comments could apply equally to 38-year old programmers that just started work after graduating from a hacker school. The fact is, when so many problems are merely iterations of previous ones, how can you ignore the wisdom of people that have been doing the same work for 20-30 years? It's ludicrous to believe that the contributions coming from a fresh grad with no practical experience will be on par with the quality of the solutions from programmers much more experienced.
chongli 12y ago
N0tch's Twitch streams are rather misleading. It seems like he has incredible speed and productivity but that's mainly because he's repeating a well-rehearsed implementation.
- kanzure 12y ago
  > but that's mainly because he's repeating a well-rehearsed implementation. I would like to watch videos of someone doing something similar, but not well-rehearsed reimplementation. Got any? Thank you..
  - learc83 12y ago
    https://handmadehero.org/ https://handmadehero.org/ Definitely not rehearsed, but the first few weeks are stuff he knows well enough that it goes really fast. After that, though he starts to get into things that he hasn't done (at least in a long time).
  - jere_jones 12y ago
    People stream themselves coding frequently. Quality varies of course, but check it out for yourself. http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/ http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/
trhway 12y ago
> It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement#History "The Stakhanovite movement was named after Aleksei Stakhanov, who had mined 102 tons of coal in less than 6 hours (14 times his quota).[1] However, his record would soon be "broken" by his followers.[1] On February 1, 1936, it was reported that Nikita Izotov had mined 607 tons of coal in a single shift. The Stakhanovite movement, supported and led by the Communist Party, soon spread over other industries of the Soviet Union.[2] " Basically all this 10x is just a way to make people produce 10x while paying still for 1x. Programmers as a blue colar job also subject to it. White collar jobs like doctors or real engineers are much more resistant to it (as psychologically they are individuals not a member of a crowd what is typical for blue collar jobs)
- etherael 12y ago
  > Programmers as a blue colar job ?
  - marcus_holmes 12y ago
    Not blue-collar because we wear blue collars or perform physical labour, but because programmers are not professionals - we're not architects, we're bricklayers. In the conventional business mindset programmers just implement a plan devised by someone else. Consequently we are fungible (easily replaced by cheaper alternatives), and a cost rather than an asset.
    - cheese1756 12y ago
      That's like arguing that surgeons are performing a blue collar job when they're given a diagnosis and test results from another physician. In theory they're performing the same repetitive motion, just like programmers are in theory creating an implementation to solve a given problem. However, there are provably good and bad surgeons and provably good and bad programmers. The reality is that you're making a lot of decisions when you cut out a tumor or implement a spec, decisions which take skill and practice to get right. I certainly wouldn't want my surgeon to be a cheaper alternative, nor would I want a programmer working for me to be the same. Not all programmers or surgeons are equivalent, since there is a large element of skill and practice.
tormeh 12y ago
>There are no [profession] blogging about "10x [profession]" for example. ... He said and about the profession with surely the highest concentration of arrogant and self-satisfied know-it-alls.
- Dewie 12y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if surgeons feel like 10X'ers compared to general practitioners, in a sense (of course, a surgeon "being 10X as productive as a GP" doesn't make literal sense).
- sien 12y ago
  Doctors, lawyers, academics are just as bad. "Illusory superiority" applies to a lot of things. Most people think they are 'good drivers' and that is where it starts. For most cognitive tasks the people who do them probably did fairly well at school, possibly the top 5 or 10 percent and so assume they are smarter than 19/20 or 9/10 people... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
steven2012 12y ago
I've been in the industry for >20 years. I've met 2 engineers/programmers that some would call the mythical 10x engineer. These are engineers that you can literally build your entire company on their shoulders because they do everything and they do everything with very few mistakes. The problem with the term is that everyone thinks they are 10x engineers, when they aren't. As I've mentioned, there were only 2 people I've met in 20+ years, so they are basically like unicorns. One of them was the VP of Engineering for the startup I was working at. He was and continues to be brilliant. He was online almost every hour of the week/day and he was always working. He singlehandedly kept our site up by himself, and when he left, it literally took 5 engineers to replace the work that he did. His leaving left such an impact that the Engineering team almost disintegrated because of how much work we had to take on, and the lack of any truly great engineers to mentor the other engineers. The other was a friend of mine who was the most productive coder I'd ever met. He would also work as hard as I've ever seen anyone work, and the code that he produced did things I've never seen people do since then. Tragically, he committed suicide 2 months ago, and it's heartbreaking. Probably the intensity to which he coded reflected on the intensity that he pursued every other thing in his life, and when things didn't work out his way, like his marriage, it probably hit him much harder than it would a regular person, who would be rightfully devastated.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  > when he left, it literally took 5 engineers to replace the work that he did I dunno, he sounds more like a 5x engineer to me!
  - lotophage 12y ago
    but they were all 2x engineers!
- jldugger 12y ago
  > He was online almost every hour of the week/day and he was always working. It's a lot easier to be a "10x engineer" when you work 2x-3x the hours everyone else.
WalterBright 12y ago
10x engineers do not work 10x harder or produce 10x code. What they do is write code that is 10x better, in that it has few problems, few design errors, does not have to be rewritten (at great cost), is more adaptable, maintainable, etc. They make the right decisions up front about the approach to make. For example, they can select the right approach to concurrency for a particular problem, rather than spending much time later chasing concurrency bugs.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  As a software engineer, I agree with you 100%. But you are likely aware that this type of 10x engineer is not who the vast majority of corporate managers and "non-technical" start-up founders are thinking of when they describe a 10x engineer. For them, a 10x engineer is simply one who produces code 10x as fast as the other engineers. In fact, simply writing code 10x as fast as usual is not a difficult task for a competent developer to accomplish. With significant overtime, and reckless abandon, any skilled developer can churn out poorly thought-out code at a rate roughly 10x greater than the rate at which a skilled developer can write well-designed, tested, documented, refactored code. This is why we have so many "10x" engineers, and so much technical debt.
balls187 12y ago
> Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. I think it's really just unique to the Bay Area, and it's wacked out culture it's been cultivating that focuses on the bang-bang-bang go-go-go 100x multiple return on dollars. I've been an engineer for over a decade, and the first time I heard the term "10x" was 6 months ago when a product manager referred to me a "10x engineer" during a conference call. It's absurd.
MichaelGG 12y ago
I wouldn't be surprised to hear there's a 10x difference in, say, error rates between the best and worst doctors. In fact, I'm almost definitely sure that's a lower bound, given my experiences with doctors in third world countries. Barbaric, some of them still are. Depending how bad the worse doctors are, 10x from "average" might be reasonable. In software development, I think that 10x number is also a lower bound if anything. Bad developers are everywhere, churning out volumes of terrible, pointless, code. In a code review a while back for a client, I made an offhanded comment about a minor thing like "make sure this list is sorted and deduped". The code owner then started "discussing" that and estimated it'd take about 2 hours. I was stunned and added the code ".Distinct().OrderBy(...)" right there in the review. I'm at a loss at how to explain that kind of difference, and that's on a micro-scale. At the other end, I've seen projects/companies go down colossally wrong paths because they simply couldn't understand basic algorithmic complexity. So, say, I dunno, a week or two to do it right, versus a year spent chasing down fake paths? That doesn't even measure the business impact of floundering around for a year while impacting customers. Focusing on "coding 10x faster" is simply misleading. Like measuring an author based on how fast they can type.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  10x difference between error rates? No, this is not the case. Well, it might be in some special situations, like a scammer and a specialist, but you'll wont find that in the case of GPs, for example. Obviously you should only compare doctors on the same field (N0tch would be quite unproductive if he suddenly had to work with COBOL, for example), and between those the difference is measured in percentages, not 1000 percentages. (I can dig up the data if you want but I definitely read this when I recently had to look into diagnostic errors.)
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    Are you taking into account doctors in shitty countries? I've personally seen people seriously harmed and killed due to what, in the US, would be viewed as criminal intent. Yet inside such a country, the cases were viewed as nothing notable. And are you really saying that inside the US, there are no practitioners with an error of 1/1000 where another one has 10/1000? That seems awfully tight.
smegel 12y ago
> I have no idea if he's coding 10x faster It's a bad myth that "speed" has anything to do with the 10x or 100x programmer. The thing that sets great programmers apart is their ability to instinctively and intuitively design elegant and correct solutions to a given problem while introducing minimal bugs. A great programmer whose code will stand the test of time without needing a total rewrite 6 months later and without a horrendous maintenance and complexity overhead could write their code at 10 words a minute and still be worth their weight in gold. Personally I think "great" programmers are really just "good" programmers - those that understand the problem domain, have expertise in their tools and know how to minimize complexity - this should not be some white albatross but rather a level we should all aspire too. I think it is more useful to identify bad programmers - those that rage in like a bull in a china shop, adding layers of complexity and abstraction to cover up their lack of knowledge and expertise, who flippantly choose bad designs for a given problem because they believe in some universal "right way" and spend half their time on premature optimizations before their buggy product is even in a testable state. I have come across numerous bad programmers in my time, and if they were nipped in the bud early before they could leave reams of damage in their wake, I can testify to many man-months in effort rectifying their mistakes.
- ellisike 12y ago
  Great programmers use source control, integrate often, and communicate with their team. They basically do all the the things we know we're supposed to do, but most only give lip service to it.
- andyjdavis 12y ago
  >know how to minimize complexity I don't think this gets nearly enough praise when assessing people. I've worked at a few different software companies with a raft of different programmers and among those who were deemed "superstars" there were certainly a few who I wouldn't want to work with (or inherit code from) given the choice due to the hideously complex nature of their output. Despite their ability to produce major functionality with incredible speed, which is often what led to them being seen as superstars by management, code that is so complex that it is virtually unmaintainable is a huge ongoing burden. Its great that you rescued a late project when everyone said it could not be done but some poor sucker is going to have to maintain that mess.
pjc50 12y ago
"10x" is not without parallel. Most of the creative and sporting fields accept logarithmic pay scales - a few multimillionaires, a tier of people making a living, and a vast number of amateurs. It's just that in sports being 0.1% better can mean winning 10x the salary.
smoyer 12y ago
I AM a 10x programmer! [1][2] [1] When writing code to solve problems I've encountered frequently in one of the languages I've used long enough to thoroughly memorize all facets of the syntax and most of the available libraries. [2] Consistently using those 10x powers would quite possibly be the most boring life I could imagine as a software engineer ... give me a hard problem to solve once, then never ask me about that problem again!
- SiVal 12y ago
  I strongly agree with your point [1]. I think the 10x programmer exists, and the phenomenon is primarily as you describe: you spend a long time figuring out how to do something with a lot of moving parts and hidden gotchas. You eventually track down every bug, resolve every misunderstanding, reorganize and simplify, and you remember what you learned. Next time something similar arises, you blow the doors off anyone else starting from scratch. I've done it myself, and it has be to quite common. I disagree with your point [2], though, at least in part. I would get bored, too, if all I ever did was to repeat things I had figured out years earlier, but if I put the effort into figuring out how to do something hard, I want to USE that hard-earned knowledge more than once. I don't want to always be a slow, awkward newbie at everything I do, which is what I am the first time I tackle most new, serious challenges, but I don't want to stop tackling new challenges either. I'd prefer a mix of the two: sometimes a newbie, sometimes an expert.
  - smoyer 12y ago
    I think we actually agree on point [2] ... using the hard-earned knowledge again while solving a new problem (of sufficient complexity) still requires significant problem-solving (puzzle solving?) skills. I've also mastered making web interfaces that perform CRUD operations against databases ... I don't want to spend my career reliving the ground-hog day of CRUD interfaces.
    - SiVal 12y ago
      I still think we disagree a little on [2], but I love your "Groundhog Day" metaphor. It's perfect, couldn't be better. If you've seen the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, you'll know what I mean when I say that sometimes that's exactly what I want. I want to be the guy who has lived this day before and looks like a genius to all those mere mortals who are experiencing it for the first time. It feels great to have such a huge advantage, especially when it was earned. But, like you, I don't want to be stuck there. I want to experience it often, but I want to have plenty of new days, too.
Havoc 12y ago
>he's coding 10x faster Faster had nothing to do with it. If anything these guys code slower. 1 line of brilliant code will always beat 10 lines of mediocre code typed very fast though
nemothekid 12y ago
Its rather strange you would bring up Notch, as I wouldn't consider Notch-run Minecraft a marvel of engineering. I'd hate to be the guy who cleans up after him, and while Minecraft works (and it is a really great game), most people consider to be terribly built.[1] So yes, while Notch is a rather speedy engineer, I wouldn't consider the skills of an engineer based on how fast they code. Maintainability is an important feature (however, at the same time maybe building a house of cards really quick than flipping it to Microsoft for 1B, maybe ignoring maintainability is not so bad). [1]http://www.computercraft.info/forums2/index.php?/topic/8325-why-minecraft-is-so-badly-written/ http://www.computercraft.info/forums2/index.php?/topic/8325-...
- platz 12y ago
  They sure picked some weak examples to pick on in that thread.
- amagumori 12y ago
  game devs like notch have made a conscious and canny decision to value actually making something over code quality. also, notch didn't build minecraft expecting it to be a runaway success. see, you are a programmer - you make code. notch is a game developer. he USES code to make THINGS. the things matter, not the code. the game developer ethic is "nothing matters but getting the game running." it's not that notch is a shoddy programmer at all, it's that he has different priorities than you.
  - reedlaw 12y ago
    I think we all use code to make things. However, not caring about the code can spell disaster for the thing we're making. In the case of Minecraft it appears the code is good enough but I wonder how many more features would exist if it wasn't for the poor design.
    - tlarkworthy 12y ago
      worth noting that games have a fairly short half-life normally, so dev's are writing a new game rather than adding features to an existing legacy game (unlike mainstream software development). You also get to vary the scope of the game as the time budget runs out.
quipp 12y ago
The 10x engineer is actually rather common place imho. If we can acknowledge that the work of some engineers create debt then we can simply find an engineer that doesn't and assume there's compound value in their work (which is probably the case).
sheepmullet 12y ago
"Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example." It takes 6-8 years of intense training to become a doctor. This is after already doing well in college and passing a tough skills/general intelligence test. The bottom 70%+ who want to become doctors are simply not able to get through the system. If we got rid of the bottom 70% of developers we wouldn't be having these 10x conversations either.
- malkia 12y ago
  Last time I checked you need much more engineers than doctors.
  - eatpb 12y ago
    I think his point was that the doctors vs engineers analogy was flawed BECAUSE we have more engineers than doctors.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- chm 12y ago
  I don't think it's a given that someone with excellent grades in high school/college could become a good doctor, even with training. The same goes for a programmer.
- guelo 12y ago
  You know what they call the guy that graduates last in his med school class? Doctor.
  - zamalek 12y ago
    > You know what they call the guy that graduates last in his med school class? A doctor who passed with at least 75%, so far as my local [third world] standards go.
- 12y ago
kzhahou 12y ago
Every time I see someone challenging the notion that there could truly be developers who are an order of magnitude better than average (faster, fewer bugs, more maintainable code, etc), I can only conclude that either: A) The person posting simply hasn't had the pleasure of working with such awesomeness. B) The person is threatened by the possibility of 10X'ers really existing, since that's a threat to their own ego. I'm a great programmer, and still know many people who leave me in the dust. I'm glad for that. "The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity" -- Nietzsche
lazyseq 12y ago
While I agree with you, at least in part a few problems here as mentioned by the previous replies. As far as N0tch, I think that's a bad person to compare yourself against. While I can respect what he achieved and envy his good luck, he is hardly what many would call a good programmer. My standards may be different than others. He may code fast compared to some people (and slower than others), but code speed/output != productivity. Judging by the state of Minecraft and bug counts of what he's done, one could do the same by shifting emphasis or priorities on getting something usable vs. bug free. It is more correct as you imply that other things are just as valuable or perhaps more. It all depends on context. N0tch might be a great prototype programmer, but a terrible programmer for writing banking software and sending things into space. We still don't have many good ways to judge people, which is why dumb managers look at things like lines of code or total hours. Indeed we know that many factors influence productivity - familiarity with the task and technologies involved, language choice, library choice, deadlines, environment, external influences, and so on. This sick culture of work will make you free is not a good one. I do believe though that many good developers who can work together in a group (very important) are better than having 100x as many people who are bad coders. It really depends how big or small a team is, how it is managed or not, and so on. Having a team of only the best coders isn't enough and can actually seal the doom of a project.

rch 12y ago

> There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" There are still 10x equivalents though. For instance, a PhD MD that chairs a department at a major hospital, publishes significant research, participates in NIH or similar organisations, and still sees patients is going to be a very different sort of professional than your local GP. It's the notion that 10x applies only to NCLOC production that needs rethinking, so you're in the ballpark in that respect.

IgorPartola 12y ago
But which doctor will give you better care? And which doctor will save more lives, or improve them in a meaningful way? Those are different jobs. Is a security researcher more or less productive than a programmer on a team of 10?
BrainInAJar 12y ago
but those 10x equivalents are specialized, and there's absolutely a place for your local GP. Whereas every company is falling over themselves to hire the 10x programmer. A local GP is what you want for tracking your longitudinal health and being a personal interaction with the health care system for you. Not someone chairing a department & publishing research
- engendered 12y ago
  Whereas every company is falling over themselves to hire the 10x programmer. Is this true? I've been involved in a number of hires over the years where we quite specifically did not want a "10x programmer". We knew the position didn't pay enough, and had enough tiresome, non-novel work (e.g. building data processes for client data. Not big enough or interesting enough to be big data or technically challenging) that we simply wanted, in effect, a marginally competent chair warmer. From seeing hiring and employment practices, this seems to be absolutely common across the industry. Similarly there is another comment that opines that every programmer thinks they're a 10x programmer. Now maybe it's because I have a work history in places like financial firms and banks and insurance and telecom, rather than pure software or Google-esque, but this is absolutely untrue. I found that the vast majority of developers were simply careerists.

IgorPartola 12y ago

It is hard to quantify programmer productivity objectively, but most of us know subjectively when we are productive and when we are not and the difference that can make. If at my baseline I am 1x, at my peak productivity I can easily see myself being at 5-15x. (How this works and how to induce this boost is a separate discussion). I believe others experience what I am talking about. From here it isn't a far leap to think that another developer may just work at that pace naturally all the time. I think this is the basis for the 10x developer mythos. Whether there is a great variation or Notch just recorded himself on days when he felt really productive (or the fact of recording himself made him productive) remains debatable. Then again, I have seen my share of the 1/10x programmers, so it is possible that it is all relative. In either case, like you said, programming a computer is only a part of the job for most people. Gathering requirements, building a product, selling it, supporting it, marketing, all factor in. Otherwise, you might say that all a car mechanic ever does is change the oil.

collyw 12y ago
Completely agree. Being able to focus on one thing uninterrupted and I can get a lot written. Sadly that happens very rarely these days.

lsd5you 12y ago

We all have a super power or two (or none or, sometimes more than two ...). Do you not think what you wrote is just liberal dogma? I think there probably are people with few things going for them. Possibly removed from you socially due to the various filters that act on our lives.

encoderer 12y ago
Unfortunately you are right. But the people who you speak of, who are without any platform or privilege, are not reading my comment on Hacker News today.
thesimpsons1022 12y ago
why liberal?

ars 12y ago

> There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Sure there are. Unlike programming where most of it is unique, and that stuff that's not is widely dismissed as "crud" (create update delete), with Dr's almost all of their work is routine. Except when it's not, and when you have difficult cases you most DEFINITELY have 10x Dr's. Have you never heard stories of patients going from Dr. to Dr. trying to figure out what's wrong with them, until they find that one genius Dr. who finally figures it out? And regarding blogging, that's what the entire series of columns on NYT called "Think like a Doctor" is!

Someone 12y ago
"Have you never heard stories of patients going from Dr. to Dr. trying to figure out what's wrong with them, until they find that one genius Dr. who finally figures it out?" Part of that is throwing die after die until a six comes up. The die that gives a six need not have _anything_ to do with it.

comrade1 12y ago

It's not a matter of coding 10X times faster than another coder. It's a matter of coding to not put yourself into common traps/pitfalls that waste your time trying to get out of. And also to make the correct decisions/strategies early in the project to put it on a track that uses the correct tools, libraries, etc. that won't waste your time later. A junior developer is almost always a net negative on a team of developers as the other developers end up having to fix their code. (one doesn't hire junior devs for their productivity but instead to train them to the point where they're no longer a net negative). If you extrapolate it further, there are developers that have so much diverse experience and think at a higher level than others that their time brings 10x time to the project than even other experienced developers.

Arwill 12y ago
What i commonly notice is if a developer starts solving the problem at its core, and then builds the interfaces around it, or he starts writing "utility" code, like writing code in hope that the problem will solve itself if enough helper code (or framework code) has been written for it. When i see a developer doing the latter, i know he will not be too productive, because he has no clear vision of the solution.
- nn3 12y ago
  You're dismissing bottom up programing. That is actually a wide used technique, especially useful when the problem is not completely understood at the beginning.
  - _asummers 12y ago
    It is also useful as a refactoring technique. Pulling common structures and patterns out to helper code often reveals the true structure of the existing code, which makes the end result easier to see.
    - lugg 12y ago
      .. That is, provided you refactor again afterward to put things into the correct abstractions. I call this pulling out into helper code function "blowing up" the code, because it usually results in an order of magnitude larger amount of lines of code. This refactoring technique certainly helps make the core logic of the (usually) over complicated program visibly easier to see / grok from a distance. From there its just a matter of reducing / refactoring / simplifying things down to more correct (at least I hope) abstractions that don't overcomplicate the solution. This is most useful when you're given something like a 5k line script that does far too many things for far too many different reasons, all with very little if any documentation. (ie, bottom up refactoring, don't really know what the solution is but you know the current solution isn't the way to go)

nerfhammer 12y ago

It's greed really - everyone wants to hire 10x engineers, but it's not like you're going to pay them 10x of course.

_yosefk 12y ago
Well, if you pay 10x for 10x more productivity you don't gain much, do you?.. Can't blame 'em for not bothering to look for a rarity for no gain.
- greenyoda 12y ago
  If one person can really do the work of ten, you can save money on overhead: - Fewer managers - a group of 10 will probably require a programming lead who spends some fraction of their time not coding. - One tenth the amount of office space and hardware. - Only paying for one person's health insurance instead of ten peoples'. - Vastly reduced communications overhead - a team of 10 people is going to spend a lot of time communicating with each other to insure that everyone is doing what they need to be doing. So I'm guessing you'll come out ahead even if you do pay ten times more for ten times the productivity. But companies rarely even pay twice as much for a developer who is exceptionally productive. The downside of having one person doing the work of ten is that it's a disaster when the person decides to quit - it's the equivalent of a whole team of people simultaneously quitting.
  - _yosefk 12y ago
    Well, yeah, if you actually pay <10x when all is counted but get an actual 10x more, then you will have gained, but grandparent said "they won't pay 10x for 10x." My tongue is in my cheek or some other such place right now because I kinda find this 10x business a bit funny, given that we can't even roughly quantify productivity. The thing I do believe in is that some people fit some kinds of work so well that it's silly to consider many other seemingly similarly qualified people as a practical alternative; as in, a hammer is good at hammering and it's not a question of it being 10x better than a shoe or 5x, it's just silly to hammer with a shoe, just don't do it. This is obvious but if phrased as "hammers are 10x shoes", it loses its obviousness and gains ridiculousness.

dhimes 12y ago

Lev Landau used to rate physicists on a log_10 scale, so the idea extends to (and perhaps started with?) physics. EDIT: grammar

crag 12y ago

I love to write code. And it's about 20% of my job. As an engineer, I spend most of my time in design (and meetings). The code is the fun, relaxing part. Many times, I don't even write code; I "review" code. We have "grunts" (younger programmers, usually) who pump out code all day. They're are involved in design too, of course. But in a very limited way. But you know, I think all of this comes with age. If you 22 years old, fresh out of school, you are going to be writing code all day. And that's how it should be, You need to cut-your-teeth. Also, one last thought, just being a [overly] productive programmer doesn't make you a good programmer. I'd rather someone take there time, be comfortable and get it right. But I have met that rare bird, who is confortable writing code 18 hours a day.

Fiahil 12y ago
> If you 22 years old, fresh out of school, you are going to be writing code all day. And that's how it should be, You need to cut-your-teeth. I'm 22 years old, fresh out of school and I'm as involved in design, recruiting and peer reviews as my older peers. And that's how it should be. Why? Because age has nothing to do with productivity, understanding or ability to come up with simple, elegant and maintainable designs.
- mediascreen 12y ago
  While age might not have anything to do with productivity, experience definitely has. Especially when it comes to recognizing which problems are worth solving and giving (appropriate) pushback to product owners and managers.
- nickynix 12y ago
  Experience has a lot to do with productivity, understanding, and the ability to come up with simple, elegant, and maintainable designs. The "22 years old, fresh out of school" programmer is more pointed at the inexperienced individual rather than age itself. I would say the same comments could apply equally to 38-year old programmers that just started work after graduating from a hacker school. The fact is, when so many problems are merely iterations of previous ones, how can you ignore the wisdom of people that have been doing the same work for 20-30 years? It's ludicrous to believe that the contributions coming from a fresh grad with no practical experience will be on par with the quality of the solutions from programmers much more experienced.

chongli 12y ago

N0tch's Twitch streams are rather misleading. It seems like he has incredible speed and productivity but that's mainly because he's repeating a well-rehearsed implementation.

kanzure 12y ago
> but that's mainly because he's repeating a well-rehearsed implementation. I would like to watch videos of someone doing something similar, but not well-rehearsed reimplementation. Got any? Thank you..
- learc83 12y ago
  https://handmadehero.org/ https://handmadehero.org/ Definitely not rehearsed, but the first few weeks are stuff he knows well enough that it goes really fast. After that, though he starts to get into things that he hasn't done (at least in a long time).
- jere_jones 12y ago
  People stream themselves coding frequently. Quality varies of course, but check it out for yourself. http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/ http://www.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopleCode/

trhway 12y ago

> It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement#History "The Stakhanovite movement was named after Aleksei Stakhanov, who had mined 102 tons of coal in less than 6 hours (14 times his quota).[1] However, his record would soon be "broken" by his followers.[1] On February 1, 1936, it was reported that Nikita Izotov had mined 607 tons of coal in a single shift. The Stakhanovite movement, supported and led by the Communist Party, soon spread over other industries of the Soviet Union.[2] " Basically all this 10x is just a way to make people produce 10x while paying still for 1x. Programmers as a blue colar job also subject to it. White collar jobs like doctors or real engineers are much more resistant to it (as psychologically they are individuals not a member of a crowd what is typical for blue collar jobs)

etherael 12y ago
> Programmers as a blue colar job ?
- marcus_holmes 12y ago
  Not blue-collar because we wear blue collars or perform physical labour, but because programmers are not professionals - we're not architects, we're bricklayers. In the conventional business mindset programmers just implement a plan devised by someone else. Consequently we are fungible (easily replaced by cheaper alternatives), and a cost rather than an asset.
  - cheese1756 12y ago
    That's like arguing that surgeons are performing a blue collar job when they're given a diagnosis and test results from another physician. In theory they're performing the same repetitive motion, just like programmers are in theory creating an implementation to solve a given problem. However, there are provably good and bad surgeons and provably good and bad programmers. The reality is that you're making a lot of decisions when you cut out a tumor or implement a spec, decisions which take skill and practice to get right. I certainly wouldn't want my surgeon to be a cheaper alternative, nor would I want a programmer working for me to be the same. Not all programmers or surgeons are equivalent, since there is a large element of skill and practice.

tormeh 12y ago

>There are no [profession] blogging about "10x [profession]" for example. ... He said and about the profession with surely the highest concentration of arrogant and self-satisfied know-it-alls.

Dewie 12y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if surgeons feel like 10X'ers compared to general practitioners, in a sense (of course, a surgeon "being 10X as productive as a GP" doesn't make literal sense).
sien 12y ago
Doctors, lawyers, academics are just as bad. "Illusory superiority" applies to a lot of things. Most people think they are 'good drivers' and that is where it starts. For most cognitive tasks the people who do them probably did fairly well at school, possibly the top 5 or 10 percent and so assume they are smarter than 19/20 or 9/10 people... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority

steven2012 12y ago

I've been in the industry for >20 years. I've met 2 engineers/programmers that some would call the mythical 10x engineer. These are engineers that you can literally build your entire company on their shoulders because they do everything and they do everything with very few mistakes. The problem with the term is that everyone thinks they are 10x engineers, when they aren't. As I've mentioned, there were only 2 people I've met in 20+ years, so they are basically like unicorns. One of them was the VP of Engineering for the startup I was working at. He was and continues to be brilliant. He was online almost every hour of the week/day and he was always working. He singlehandedly kept our site up by himself, and when he left, it literally took 5 engineers to replace the work that he did. His leaving left such an impact that the Engineering team almost disintegrated because of how much work we had to take on, and the lack of any truly great engineers to mentor the other engineers. The other was a friend of mine who was the most productive coder I'd ever met. He would also work as hard as I've ever seen anyone work, and the code that he produced did things I've never seen people do since then. Tragically, he committed suicide 2 months ago, and it's heartbreaking. Probably the intensity to which he coded reflected on the intensity that he pursued every other thing in his life, and when things didn't work out his way, like his marriage, it probably hit him much harder than it would a regular person, who would be rightfully devastated.

wlesieutre 12y ago
> when he left, it literally took 5 engineers to replace the work that he did I dunno, he sounds more like a 5x engineer to me!
- lotophage 12y ago
  but they were all 2x engineers!
jldugger 12y ago
> He was online almost every hour of the week/day and he was always working. It's a lot easier to be a "10x engineer" when you work 2x-3x the hours everyone else.

WalterBright 12y ago

10x engineers do not work 10x harder or produce 10x code. What they do is write code that is 10x better, in that it has few problems, few design errors, does not have to be rewritten (at great cost), is more adaptable, maintainable, etc. They make the right decisions up front about the approach to make. For example, they can select the right approach to concurrency for a particular problem, rather than spending much time later chasing concurrency bugs.

jnbiche 12y ago
As a software engineer, I agree with you 100%. But you are likely aware that this type of 10x engineer is not who the vast majority of corporate managers and "non-technical" start-up founders are thinking of when they describe a 10x engineer. For them, a 10x engineer is simply one who produces code 10x as fast as the other engineers. In fact, simply writing code 10x as fast as usual is not a difficult task for a competent developer to accomplish. With significant overtime, and reckless abandon, any skilled developer can churn out poorly thought-out code at a rate roughly 10x greater than the rate at which a skilled developer can write well-designed, tested, documented, refactored code. This is why we have so many "10x" engineers, and so much technical debt.

balls187 12y ago

> Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. I think it's really just unique to the Bay Area, and it's wacked out culture it's been cultivating that focuses on the bang-bang-bang go-go-go 100x multiple return on dollars. I've been an engineer for over a decade, and the first time I heard the term "10x" was 6 months ago when a product manager referred to me a "10x engineer" during a conference call. It's absurd.

MichaelGG 12y ago

I wouldn't be surprised to hear there's a 10x difference in, say, error rates between the best and worst doctors. In fact, I'm almost definitely sure that's a lower bound, given my experiences with doctors in third world countries. Barbaric, some of them still are. Depending how bad the worse doctors are, 10x from "average" might be reasonable. In software development, I think that 10x number is also a lower bound if anything. Bad developers are everywhere, churning out volumes of terrible, pointless, code. In a code review a while back for a client, I made an offhanded comment about a minor thing like "make sure this list is sorted and deduped". The code owner then started "discussing" that and estimated it'd take about 2 hours. I was stunned and added the code ".Distinct().OrderBy(...)" right there in the review. I'm at a loss at how to explain that kind of difference, and that's on a micro-scale. At the other end, I've seen projects/companies go down colossally wrong paths because they simply couldn't understand basic algorithmic complexity. So, say, I dunno, a week or two to do it right, versus a year spent chasing down fake paths? That doesn't even measure the business impact of floundering around for a year while impacting customers. Focusing on "coding 10x faster" is simply misleading. Like measuring an author based on how fast they can type.

sz4kerto 12y ago
10x difference between error rates? No, this is not the case. Well, it might be in some special situations, like a scammer and a specialist, but you'll wont find that in the case of GPs, for example. Obviously you should only compare doctors on the same field (N0tch would be quite unproductive if he suddenly had to work with COBOL, for example), and between those the difference is measured in percentages, not 1000 percentages. (I can dig up the data if you want but I definitely read this when I recently had to look into diagnostic errors.)
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Are you taking into account doctors in shitty countries? I've personally seen people seriously harmed and killed due to what, in the US, would be viewed as criminal intent. Yet inside such a country, the cases were viewed as nothing notable. And are you really saying that inside the US, there are no practitioners with an error of 1/1000 where another one has 10/1000? That seems awfully tight.

smegel 12y ago

> I have no idea if he's coding 10x faster It's a bad myth that "speed" has anything to do with the 10x or 100x programmer. The thing that sets great programmers apart is their ability to instinctively and intuitively design elegant and correct solutions to a given problem while introducing minimal bugs. A great programmer whose code will stand the test of time without needing a total rewrite 6 months later and without a horrendous maintenance and complexity overhead could write their code at 10 words a minute and still be worth their weight in gold. Personally I think "great" programmers are really just "good" programmers - those that understand the problem domain, have expertise in their tools and know how to minimize complexity - this should not be some white albatross but rather a level we should all aspire too. I think it is more useful to identify bad programmers - those that rage in like a bull in a china shop, adding layers of complexity and abstraction to cover up their lack of knowledge and expertise, who flippantly choose bad designs for a given problem because they believe in some universal "right way" and spend half their time on premature optimizations before their buggy product is even in a testable state. I have come across numerous bad programmers in my time, and if they were nipped in the bud early before they could leave reams of damage in their wake, I can testify to many man-months in effort rectifying their mistakes.

ellisike 12y ago
Great programmers use source control, integrate often, and communicate with their team. They basically do all the the things we know we're supposed to do, but most only give lip service to it.
andyjdavis 12y ago
>know how to minimize complexity I don't think this gets nearly enough praise when assessing people. I've worked at a few different software companies with a raft of different programmers and among those who were deemed "superstars" there were certainly a few who I wouldn't want to work with (or inherit code from) given the choice due to the hideously complex nature of their output. Despite their ability to produce major functionality with incredible speed, which is often what led to them being seen as superstars by management, code that is so complex that it is virtually unmaintainable is a huge ongoing burden. Its great that you rescued a late project when everyone said it could not be done but some poor sucker is going to have to maintain that mess.

pjc50 12y ago

"10x" is not without parallel. Most of the creative and sporting fields accept logarithmic pay scales - a few multimillionaires, a tier of people making a living, and a vast number of amateurs. It's just that in sports being 0.1% better can mean winning 10x the salary.

smoyer 12y ago

I AM a 10x programmer! [1][2] [1] When writing code to solve problems I've encountered frequently in one of the languages I've used long enough to thoroughly memorize all facets of the syntax and most of the available libraries. [2] Consistently using those 10x powers would quite possibly be the most boring life I could imagine as a software engineer ... give me a hard problem to solve once, then never ask me about that problem again!

SiVal 12y ago
I strongly agree with your point [1]. I think the 10x programmer exists, and the phenomenon is primarily as you describe: you spend a long time figuring out how to do something with a lot of moving parts and hidden gotchas. You eventually track down every bug, resolve every misunderstanding, reorganize and simplify, and you remember what you learned. Next time something similar arises, you blow the doors off anyone else starting from scratch. I've done it myself, and it has be to quite common. I disagree with your point [2], though, at least in part. I would get bored, too, if all I ever did was to repeat things I had figured out years earlier, but if I put the effort into figuring out how to do something hard, I want to USE that hard-earned knowledge more than once. I don't want to always be a slow, awkward newbie at everything I do, which is what I am the first time I tackle most new, serious challenges, but I don't want to stop tackling new challenges either. I'd prefer a mix of the two: sometimes a newbie, sometimes an expert.
- smoyer 12y ago
  I think we actually agree on point [2] ... using the hard-earned knowledge again while solving a new problem (of sufficient complexity) still requires significant problem-solving (puzzle solving?) skills. I've also mastered making web interfaces that perform CRUD operations against databases ... I don't want to spend my career reliving the ground-hog day of CRUD interfaces.
  - SiVal 12y ago
    I still think we disagree a little on [2], but I love your "Groundhog Day" metaphor. It's perfect, couldn't be better. If you've seen the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, you'll know what I mean when I say that sometimes that's exactly what I want. I want to be the guy who has lived this day before and looks like a genius to all those mere mortals who are experiencing it for the first time. It feels great to have such a huge advantage, especially when it was earned. But, like you, I don't want to be stuck there. I want to experience it often, but I want to have plenty of new days, too.

Havoc 12y ago

>he's coding 10x faster Faster had nothing to do with it. If anything these guys code slower. 1 line of brilliant code will always beat 10 lines of mediocre code typed very fast though

nemothekid 12y ago

Its rather strange you would bring up Notch, as I wouldn't consider Notch-run Minecraft a marvel of engineering. I'd hate to be the guy who cleans up after him, and while Minecraft works (and it is a really great game), most people consider to be terribly built.[1] So yes, while Notch is a rather speedy engineer, I wouldn't consider the skills of an engineer based on how fast they code. Maintainability is an important feature (however, at the same time maybe building a house of cards really quick than flipping it to Microsoft for 1B, maybe ignoring maintainability is not so bad). [1]http://www.computercraft.info/forums2/index.php?/topic/8325-why-minecraft-is-so-badly-written/ http://www.computercraft.info/forums2/index.php?/topic/8325-...

platz 12y ago
They sure picked some weak examples to pick on in that thread.
amagumori 12y ago
game devs like notch have made a conscious and canny decision to value actually making something over code quality. also, notch didn't build minecraft expecting it to be a runaway success. see, you are a programmer - you make code. notch is a game developer. he USES code to make THINGS. the things matter, not the code. the game developer ethic is "nothing matters but getting the game running." it's not that notch is a shoddy programmer at all, it's that he has different priorities than you.
- reedlaw 12y ago
  I think we all use code to make things. However, not caring about the code can spell disaster for the thing we're making. In the case of Minecraft it appears the code is good enough but I wonder how many more features would exist if it wasn't for the poor design.
  - tlarkworthy 12y ago
    worth noting that games have a fairly short half-life normally, so dev's are writing a new game rather than adding features to an existing legacy game (unlike mainstream software development). You also get to vary the scope of the game as the time budget runs out.

quipp 12y ago

The 10x engineer is actually rather common place imho. If we can acknowledge that the work of some engineers create debt then we can simply find an engineer that doesn't and assume there's compound value in their work (which is probably the case).

sheepmullet 12y ago

"Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example." It takes 6-8 years of intense training to become a doctor. This is after already doing well in college and passing a tough skills/general intelligence test. The bottom 70%+ who want to become doctors are simply not able to get through the system. If we got rid of the bottom 70% of developers we wouldn't be having these 10x conversations either.

malkia 12y ago
Last time I checked you need much more engineers than doctors.
- eatpb 12y ago
  I think his point was that the doctors vs engineers analogy was flawed BECAUSE we have more engineers than doctors.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
chm 12y ago
I don't think it's a given that someone with excellent grades in high school/college could become a good doctor, even with training. The same goes for a programmer.
guelo 12y ago
You know what they call the guy that graduates last in his med school class? Doctor.
- zamalek 12y ago
  > You know what they call the guy that graduates last in his med school class? A doctor who passed with at least 75%, so far as my local [third world] standards go.
12y ago

kzhahou 12y ago

Every time I see someone challenging the notion that there could truly be developers who are an order of magnitude better than average (faster, fewer bugs, more maintainable code, etc), I can only conclude that either: A) The person posting simply hasn't had the pleasure of working with such awesomeness. B) The person is threatened by the possibility of 10X'ers really existing, since that's a threat to their own ego. I'm a great programmer, and still know many people who leave me in the dust. I'm glad for that. "The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity" -- Nietzsche

lazyseq 12y ago

While I agree with you, at least in part a few problems here as mentioned by the previous replies. As far as N0tch, I think that's a bad person to compare yourself against. While I can respect what he achieved and envy his good luck, he is hardly what many would call a good programmer. My standards may be different than others. He may code fast compared to some people (and slower than others), but code speed/output != productivity. Judging by the state of Minecraft and bug counts of what he's done, one could do the same by shifting emphasis or priorities on getting something usable vs. bug free. It is more correct as you imply that other things are just as valuable or perhaps more. It all depends on context. N0tch might be a great prototype programmer, but a terrible programmer for writing banking software and sending things into space. We still don't have many good ways to judge people, which is why dumb managers look at things like lines of code or total hours. Indeed we know that many factors influence productivity - familiarity with the task and technologies involved, language choice, library choice, deadlines, environment, external influences, and so on. This sick culture of work will make you free is not a good one. I do believe though that many good developers who can work together in a group (very important) are better than having 100x as many people who are bad coders. It really depends how big or small a team is, how it is managed or not, and so on. Having a team of only the best coders isn't enough and can actually seal the doom of a project.