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The programming talent myth

• belovedeagle 11y ago
  The problem with the argument that "Programming skill can't be bimodal because that would be elitist and make me feel bad about myself being an elitist" is that there's a lot of evidence that programming skill is bimodal. Look at fizzbuzz as an obvious, if not entirely complete, example. Would it make us all feel better if programming skill weren't bimodal? Sure. But a roomful of people clapping at that proposition doesn't make it true.
  • vonmoltke 11y ago
    > Look at fizzbuzz as an obvious, if not entirely complete, example. I am not entirely convinced this is not partially a resume screening and talent pipeline problem. Has anyone ever given Fizzbuzz problems to everyone who applied to a position? If you haven't, have you ever considered that your screening process may be broken in the sense that you are passing too many liars who then bomb the Fizzbuzz portion, but who bump competent people off the stack entirely so you never test them?
    • shubb 11y ago
      I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. Presumably, when you do a resume sift, you look for people with either a qualification or work experience. Either they somehow faked it through those, or your test is bad. Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev?
      • vonmoltke 11y ago
        I don't think there are "lots", but I think there are enough to distort the view of the labor pool. Additionally, there is the issue of these fakers staying in the pool much longer and spraying their resumes out more often further distorting the view. As for how they get through the screen, I think they just blatantly lie on their resume hoping to get a company that doesn't do its due diligence in determining if the stated experience is real.
      • Kalium 11y ago
        > I find this idea that there are lots of fake programmers kind of nuts. I don't know about "lots", but there are definitely people out there who claim to be programmers but lack the basic competencies they claim. I've encountered several. A couple of years ago, I was part of a battery of interviews for a candidate who claimed a Master's in CS. Their resume said they had done advanced work in parallelization of video compression. I asked them about it - I wanted to know how they had handled synchronization and locking. The candidate looked at me blankly for a couple of seconds. Then they began, haltingly, to talk about web sessions and logging. We didn't hire the person, but there was definitely some bullshit along the way...
        • crucini 11y ago
          To be fair, they are kind of separate problems. In Clojure, for instance, you can write parallel code and the nuts and bolts are handled for you.
          • Kalium 11y ago
            With the tools this person claimed to have used, they very much would have handled all the nuts and bolts.
      • cheald 11y ago
        I've interviewed people for programming positions with work experience who had trouble articulating solutions to very simple problems. I don't know that I'd call them "fake programmers", but "bad programmers who lack the ability to reason about code and instead rely on StackOverflow answers to provide solutions to the problems they're faced with" are all over the industry.
      • emodendroket 11y ago
        I'm generating some HTML. I would like to create a new row on every third element. How might I do this?
      • DanBC 11y ago
        > Fizzbuzz actually tests if you know what % does. Is that critical knowledge for a webdev? The point about fizzbuzz is that some people fail it even when you give them a list of functions and how to use them. Finding out whether this is relevant to how they do when actually working rather than in a high pressure interview situation is an open question.
      • dbenhur 11y ago
        The world of actual programmers is NOT filled with fake programmers. The world of people actively applying for advertised programming positions IS dominated by fake programmers. That's why FizzBuzz is an effective screen. As to your last question, a "webdev" who doesn't understand integer modulus is a fake programmer. Is it critical? I suppose it's not if your grid is never wider than one column and you never want to alternatively style rows in a list or table.
    • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      In which case it becomes bimodal in the sense there are people who consider themselves programmers but who do not meet enough skill to be considered one.
    • lolatu54 11y ago
      We give fizzbuzz style tests to all our candidates. Most fail, but it's not an indicator of experience at all. Some of the quickest to pass just got out of GA and never worked in the industry before. It really tests aptitude at a specific type of problem. Because of this it does not make or break the interview. We also look at their portfolio/code samples as well. After interviewing many candidates I've found the one's who pass our fizzbuzz tests also have much better code. Because of this I'm convinced that aptitude and passion are significantly important to the ability to program. Just grinding your way through CS classes will not a programmer make. I should add we let the candidates use google, so even if they don't know modulus or whatever, they still can prove their ability to look up things.
      • sokoloff 11y ago
        > Because of this it does not make or break the interview. You mean that you continue the interview process for a coding position with someone who failed FizzBuzz algorithmically/structurally (not for a trivial syntax error)? At a prior game company we gave what I felt was a FizzBuzz-level task on paper: in C, given a string of characters representing a hex number, return the long it represents. (basically, write strtol(input, NULL, 16); without using strtol) I was appalled at the number of people who couldn't come close (not subtle bugs or mis-handling case issues, but rather: show someone else their code and have that person guess what function the person was trying to write). When the Fizzbuzz blog post(s) came out, representing a much simpler problem, I couldn't believe that someone would bother to shower and leave the house to interview for a programming position and be unable to do Fizzbuzz. So I gave Fizzbuzz to a few candidates, often in a joking sort of way (so as to not offend any qualified candidates). Results were predictably shocking and dismaying. It's a problem simple enough that you either can do it or not; there's precious little middle ground. (As other posters mention, these are the people that interview over and over, so hopefully the actual employed population of programmers is overwhelmingly able to do it.)
  • smitherfield 11y ago
    I think you can break it down further into four groups. People who, when presented with FizzBuzz on their first day of learning programming would: (1) Not even try, because it's "too confusing." (c. 90% of the population). (2) Be able to finish only with significant assistance from others. (3) Be able to finish on their own through trial and error. (4) Finish quickly, and wonder why they were asked to solve such a boring problem. Note that programming ability is a function of interest in the subject as well as intelligence. I'd say that most people who go into programming are somewhere between groups 2 and 3, while most who end up being successful at it in the long term are somewhere between groups 3 and 4.
    • lampe3 11y ago
      so lets say if i solve fizzbuzz quickly iam clever. i have solved it but in a shitty confusing way but i have solved it. but someone who solves it through trial and error and learns new stuff about what can go wrong and how it works is not so clever? coding is always trail and error because you cant think of all the possibilities and through error you learn and become better so yeah give me more of 3 then of 4
      • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        Because the fast solver has moved on to a harder problem and is learning more complex new stuff.
        • lampe3 11y ago
          no the fast solver has solved the problem and is doing nothing ;)
    • Kluny 11y ago
      Group 1 will never be programmers, group 2 is where I fell the first time I tried it. Group 3 probably have some training and group 4 probably have some programming related experience, or maybe they are superheroes. At any rate, anyone in groups 2-4 can become excellent programmers if they apply themselves and get the help they need. They can be plotted on a programmer competency bell-curve. Group 1 are the people who will never learn to code because they refuse to try. They probably make up the first hump of the perceived bi-modal competency graph. But they were never really in the running at all. I can think of at least 2 people in my 30-person cohort in college who did not know how to code, and would fall in the first hump of a bi-modal competency graph, despite having passed 2 years of programming courses. So my theory is that the second hump is a normal bell curve, and the first hump is people who won't try.
  • taeric 11y ago
    Isn't this akin to claiming that drawing is bimodal because most people can't draft a portrait in an interview. Or, worse, that there is an element of gender influence in ability because, "otherwise there would be more female programmers." I certainly agree that there is likely a gulf between good and great. Probably another above it. I'm curious to know what actual evidence there is.
    • belovedeagle 11y ago
      I imagine that drawing is probably bimodal too; it probably just has a wider bell curve on the right...
    • exstudent2 11y ago
      Drawing seems like a great analogy because it definitely is also bimodal. Some people can draft a portrait in an interview and those people would be the ones you would want to hire to be your portrait artists.
      • taeric 11y ago
        This cuts to two important points. First, you will be hiring as if it was bimodal. The second point, though, is more whether or not it actually is bimodal, or it is just taught into a bimodal distribution? That is, is it intrinsically this way, or is that a biproduct of how society values and teaches it?
        • exstudent2 11y ago
          Yes, I will be hiring bimodal and it's worked very well for me. Whenever I relax my process and hire someone I'm not sure is a great developer I always regret it later when they can't perform and their work brings down others. The more experience I have, the more I stick to working with the best people I can. There are just too many ways to fail and having a team of experts is the best mitigation you can have against it.
          • taeric 11y ago
  • dataker 11y ago
    If one thinks he will never excel because there's nothing to be excelled, I doubt anyone would wanna do that.
  • speeder 11y ago
    As someone that works in the game industry and interacts with programmers and artists (not only graphical art, I am also counting here writing, music, etc...) daily it is BLARINGLY OBVIOUS that both skills require certain brain patterns. Although there are some rare people that are both great programmers and great artists at the same time, usually the person is a programmer, or an artist, they might know skills of the other side (example: I am a programmer, but I have a design bachelor's degree, and know how to use lots of artists tools and correct art made by others, but I would never call myself a good artist) but they are clearly one thing, not two. This usually is also reflected in their behaviour, for example programmers frequently act in more logical or common sense manners (or sometimes in a extreme logical manner that go against common sense, but still logical), and can be viewer in some ways as "boring", and tend to prefer things rooted in reality. The artists are not uncommon to do things that are unexpected, or to like outlandish stuff, for example when playing an RPG with extensive character customization you will usually see the programmers min/maxing the stats or trying to go for realistic stats, and outfit the character in realistic clothes, or the best equipment in terms of stats. Now when you look at an artist character they frequently are different, for example you might see a orc magician, or a space marine with low accuracy stats, high charisma and that paints his armour pink with yellow dots. Then when we get to real work, the need for talent is obvious: Innate programmers frequently make boring art, IF they can make good art at all. Innate artists sometimes can make some code, but usually it is badly engineered code (prone to bugs and breaking), and that is, sometimes, most artists can't code at all, you can try to teach them all you want, and they just don't understand, even those that might grasp the syntax still end never getting past basic logic. Of course, sometimes you find some people that are exceptions, for example the Falanghe brothers: Felipe Falanghe is the creator of KSP, he, and his twin brother, studied with me at university, they are clearly artists, during university their highest grades were always in pure art related classes, they could make amazing drawings, and they had a band and were both fairly good singers and guitar players, yet both of them decided to learn Flash and Unity coding, and although their code was frequently broken, hard to read, confusing and had huge amount of memory leaks, clearly it was possible to do something with it, since KSP is a success, and Felipe Falanghe started coding it by himself in Unity.
• empressplay 11y ago
  That programming is a talent is not a myth, and while my life is currently devoted to developing a platform to encourage more people to learn the basics of computer science, I will certainly never say "anyone can learn how to code" any more than I'd say "anyone can become a concert pianist" or "anyone can become a master painter." Good programming is an art, and requires talent on the part of the programmer. There's nothing wrong in saying that. The issue is that there are thousands and thousands of potentially great programmers who simply never try programming, just as there are thousands and thousands of never-will-be concert pianists. But many children take piano lessons just in case. Why can't they also take coding lessons? Just to see?
  • iamthepieman 11y ago
    A quote from one of my favorite films sums this up nicely. "Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere." -Anton Ego from "Ratatouille"[1] [1] full quote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/quotes?item=qt0465220 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/quotes?item=qt0465220
  • lampe3 11y ago
    to be a great concert pianist it is 5% talent 95% hard hard work... If you dont train your fingers every day and if you dont play for at least 1 hour everyday since your 10 or younger you wont become a great concert pianist... you can say the same for coding. it is 5% talent but the rest is coding coding coding coding... If you have talent the start will be easier but at some point talent wont help anymore just studying and trying.
    • Zikes 11y ago
      It's not inaccurate or offensive to say that some people are more naturally gifted in some areas than other people. It's certainly possible that with 10,000 hours of practice the average person could become competent at just about anything, but there will be outliers on both ends of that spectrum.
    • empressplay 11y ago
      I agree that practice is integral to being successful as a concert pianist (I am a pianist also so I didn't make the comparison casually), but to give a truly inspiring performance (and not just be a human player-piano) requires much more than just memorisation and repetition. It requires creativity and instinct as much as skill. Programming is similar. If you were to boil programming down to simply "engineer a list of commands to make the computer do X" then sure, most people can do it, with practice and documentation. But to make the computer do X with efficiency, or to make the computer do X in a new and novel way -- or even discover that X is the wrong way to go and the computer really should be doing Y -- also requires creativity and instinct, just like giving a great performance at the piano. "Greatness does not come from programming by rote."
• exstudent2 11y ago
  > If the only options are to be amazing or terrible, it leads people to believe they must be passionate about their career, that they must think about programming every waking moment of their life. If they take their eye off the ball even for a minute, they will slide right from amazing to terrible again. That leads people to be working crazy hours at work, to be constantly studying programming topics on their own time, and so on. In my experience people really are either amazing or terrible and those that are amazing are super passionate about programming, think about it and study it all the time... I don't really understand the argument as to why this isn't desirable. Just like any difficult task, performing well is going to take a lot of practice and dedication to keep your skills fresh.
  • gaius 11y ago
    99% of the software that actually matters - medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches, you name it - is written by people who work 9-5 and don't think about their jobs outside work. If all the websites programmed by "rock stars" shutdown overnight, the next week everyone would have forgotten they ever existed.
    • tines 11y ago
      But the software that was used to write that 99% of software that actually matters was probably written by "rock stars" in their spare time.
      • vonmoltke 11y ago
        Not really. Matlab, WindRiver RTOS, LabView, Visual Studio, Intellij, and a whole bunch of other critical tools in that area were not written by hobbyists.
    • exstudent2 11y ago
      Having worked on several systems like that, I can say there are definitely passionate developers behind any serious code. An "old guy" I know that has lead development on several extremely high volume payment processing systems has the most extensive personal CS library I've ever seen. No one is writing high performance code without deep knowledge of what they're doing.
• serve_yay 11y ago
  Well, I just disagree. I've been doing this professionally for over 10 years and some people are bad to okay at it, and others are good to excellent. If there isn't some deep-seated reason why people fall into one group or the other, if it's just practice or whatever, fine. I don't know what the explanation is. And I don't assume it's impossible to move from one group to the other, far from it. But I would say the bi-modal thing seems roughly correct.
  • hnnewguy 11y ago
    Huh? You say you disagree, but then state that programmers can range from bad to okay to good to excellent? That isn't bimodal, and is precisely the authors point?
• bhz 11y ago
  It's not bimodal, because there there are 10 different types of people.
  • mark-r 11y ago
    I've heard that joke before. You did not do it justice.
• dataker 11y ago
  One the main issues with such collectivist argument is that programming is more than solely 'programming'. A great developer innovates, organizes, leads and motivates other programmers in a way others are not able to do. Kaplan-Moss is a perfect example of it. For example, maybe, it's true that anyone is able to build a CRUD website. However, maybe, not everyone is able to start and manage an open-source project.
  • Kurtz79 11y ago
    Not really, programming is 'solely' programming, as in the ability to generate code that is reliable, readable, well organized, efficient, etc... . What you are talking about is programmers that in addition to their technical skills have also leadership and management capabilities, which make them absolutely invaluable in a company, but not necessarily more skilled or "talented" at programming than others.
• bitL 11y ago
  Tyranny of mediocrity commences...
• cmenge 11y ago
  It's not that programming skill (whatever that is) is bimodal, it's the effectiveness of the engineer in a typical development scenario. That stems at least partly from the fact that programming is hardly ever a one-person endeavor, contrary to running. Since scaling a team increases friction and overhead, a small number of highly skilled engineers can be absurdly more effective than a set of teams, which also makes them more valuable, but not necessarily as extreme as in sports. Add preferential attachment to the equation (good engineers try to work with other good engineers / hire only top talent), and the U-curve starts to make sense IMHO.
  • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    It also doesn't count for how low skill (inherent, trained, etc.) can have a negative impact on a project by incurring vast amounts of technical debt that will have to be repaid that outweigh any positive contributions made.
    • agentultra 11y ago
      I haven't really seen any evidence that this is true. The talent myth as Adrian describes it is one of stereotyping: there's no data to accurately measure skill in programming so we simplify things in our heads and believe you're either talented or not. This myth appears to directly support your claim: untalented individuals are a cost burden on the enterprise. If this were true there would be far fewer enterprises to match the number of actually talented programmers: that is to say you and I are not likely one of them. The reality I've experienced suggests that deliberate process correlates strongly to quality. In the absence of true talent we can still write great software by leveraging processes and tools to wrangle complexity and manage defects. We see this in plenty of engineering disciplines. Why is software so special?
      • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        >The reality I've experienced suggests that deliberate process correlates strongly to quality. In the absence of true talent we can still write great software by leveraging processes and tools to wrangle complexity and manage defects. We see this in plenty of engineering disciplines. Why is software so special? Because of the entry level. Think of this joke: What do you call the guy who graduates from medical school as the bottom of his class? Doctor. The point is that even though there is a worst, they still have to have gotten so far. Even the worst engineer had to do good enough to become an engineer, which is a far greater test of skill than what I've seen in some interviews, especially when those hiring are not technically experienced. I think many who call this a myth happen to have rarely come across these people in technical roles. At worst they may have interviewed a few, but they were quickly cast aside. They've never met a person who managed to get into a senior position as a cargo cult programmer who can't explain even the basics of the frameworks they are using.
• diminoten 11y ago
  There is a myth, but the myth propels reality. Take this line in the article as a reason: > That leads people to be working crazy hours at work, to be constantly studying programming topics on their own time, and so on. This attitude will create ninjas/rockstars/whatever, even if the original notion isn't true. Folks who spend every waking hour thinking about and learning about something are going to be better than the folks who don't do that level of effort. I agree that programming skill is going to shape itself into a bell curve, but I would also argue that a bump exists in the 3rd or 4th standard deviation, with all the folks who've been driven (for good or bad reasons) to eat/drink/breathe programming. The thrust of the article is that it's okay to be mediocre, and I agree, but I don't think it's healthy to be satisfied with where you are in any skill-based craft. It's more healthy to be okay that you're not already better (I'm not a rockstar yet), but being okay with not getting better is a toxic thought.
  • gaius 11y ago
    This attitude will create ninjas/rockstars/whatever, even if the original notion isn't true. Folks who spend every waking hour thinking about and learning about something are going to be better than the folks who don't do that level of effort. It will create people who believe themselves to be something special, sure, but that's all you can say for certain. Where are the results that prove it is deteministic? For every startup full of rockstars that succeeds, there are 1000 who worked just as hard and sunk without a trace.
    • diminoten2 11y ago
      One can say, with absolute and unwavering certainty based on what we know about practice, that folks who spend every waking hour thinking about and learning about some specific skill will tend to display a higher level of competence than those who don't. Obviously there will be folks who practice incorrectly, and there will be folks who hit a skill ceiling, and there will be a myriad of folks who aren't maximally benefitting from their practice for one reason or another, but if you take a group of people who study and pit them against a group of people who do not study, the group who studies will be more proficient at the given task.
• marktangotango 11y ago
  >>Part of the problem there is the lack of a way to even measure coding ability. "We are infants in figuring out how to measure our ability to produce software", he said. What are our metrics? Lines of code—what does that measure? Story points? "What even is a story point?", he wondered. Indeed, what is programming talent? What is a 'good' programmer? What is a 10x rock star? These notions are similarly ill defined. I can think of at least 3 formulations of 'talent': 1. A developer who can craft an exquisite solution to a problem using the patterns of the domain and/or the idioms of the language. 2. A developer who puts in Heroic efforts to produce a lot of code in a short amount of timing, to meet business objectives. 3. A developer who is 'smart and gets things done'. One can poke holes into any of these formulations; is the exquisite solution delivered in a reasonable amount of time? Is the quickly delivered code maintainable and extensible or a maintenance nightmare? Does the smart and get things done guy leave a spaghetti trail in his wake? In the end, I think we've all noticed that some people tend to simply accomplish more, with less issues and drama than others. Is this real? Or simply navel gazing? I tend to think it's real. Edit: spelling
  • Zikes 11y ago
    I suspect it will always be a largely subjective measure mostly determined by the respect or accolades of one's peers or the satisfaction of one's target audience/customers. I think StackExchange's "reputation" system is probably the most accurate discrete measure available.
    • pjc50 11y ago
      Reputation on SE is very, very dependent on the amount of time you put in and your choice of which questions to answer. It's also somewhat zero-sum in a crowded field, as you need attention to get upvotes. (I should know, I'm one of the 50 people on electronics.stackexchange with more than 10k rep, and no formal qualifications in electronics)
    • gaius 11y ago
      I think StackExchange's "reputation" system is probably the most accurate discrete measure available I would be very hesitant to rely on any metrics coming out of SE. Consider their great programming survey this year, they say the average age of a programmer is 29. The US Department of Labor says it's 49. There are a vast number of people out there, well over 90% of the programming industry I'll wager, who come into work at 9am, do good, solid work all day, on applications that run the real world, then go home at 5pm and get on with their lives, who never interact with SE et al at all.
• mcafeeryan92 11y ago
  I couldn't agree more. When I first started out studying CS I was constantly afraid that I wouldn't be able to cut it because I didn't always immediately see how to solve algorithmic problems or write code that would work. I got bogged down in thinking about programming as a problem of learning syntax, and missed 'obvious' things. I couldn't reverse a string or write FizzBuzz and in fact part of the reason for that was that I was so sure that programming was a magical ability that I didn't have because I compared myself to people who had been writing code since their childhoods, and this created nerves which made it hard to really think about solving these problems instead of feeling helpless when I didn't immediately 'know' their solutions. I powered through that and ended up doing very well in my CS program at Northwestern, and now am a professional software developer that my peers consider to be a 'rockstar' programmer, although I still contend that I am mediocre and there is always SO much more to learn. At my job I frequently mentor our college interns, and many of them when they come into the job would be laughed out of the room by 'good' programmers, but after a little bit of mentoring and consistent daily practice on the job, in 2 months they emerge 'rockstar' programmers themselves, and in reality they are still probably about average. Most of the 'bad' programmers many of us come into contact with are just farther behind on their journey to being great software developers, and may only be as bad as they are because of fear to ask questions and be judged by those who think there are only 2 types of programmers.
  • pjc50 11y ago
    On magical ability: there's a joke image going around which tells you how you can easily learn to draw an owl. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl 1. Draw two circles. 2. Draw the rest of the owl. This is a common problem in art, music, sport and programming - you have an expert trying to teach newbies, and they say "just do this". The newbies have no idea how to begin to do it and the expert knows it so intuitively they cannot break it down further. Everyone ends up staring blankly at one another. Getting people past that point seems to be a skill of its own. Certainly it's not been easily packaged for programming. Learning involves a lot of guided experimentation, and keeping the student's morale up is just as important as the material itself.
• bhauer 11y ago
  Subscriber-only content. Does anyone feel a bit guilty for reading it without a subscription?
  • ZeroGravitas 11y ago
    The person posting it is the owner of the site so no need to feel guilty. It's a great resource though so people should think about subscribing.
  • corbet 11y ago
    Indeed, I hope you feel overwhelmed by the sort of guilt that only purchasing a subscription can dispel. Inspiring such feelings was my motivation for posting the link in the first place :) (I'm the lead editor of LWN.net).
    • bshimmin 11y ago
      Is there anything that can be done to make LWN.net look a bit nicer? There's often very good and interesting content on there - for which I'm grateful! - but the presentation really is rather a throwback to the pre-CSS days.
      • corbet 11y ago
        There's a new site design in the works; subscribers can play with it now. It improves the situation in a lot of ways, especially on small screens. But the text-centric nature of the site is not going to change.
• forloop 11y ago
  The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE YouTube doesn't have playback at 3x speed, unfortunately.
  • thoman23 11y ago
    Open dev tools console: document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3.0;
    • forloop 11y ago
      TY! Turned it into a bookmarklet†. † javascript:document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3.0;
• lessthunk 11y ago
  I think the article is a bit simplistic; There are different types of skills -- and if you can combine them, you are the 10 to 100x times person; Understand the business problem, and then have enough tech skill to solve it and you can move mountains. Most managers know neither the business domain, nor the technology, which makes it even harder. Like in everything in life, 90 to 95% is BS.
• nilkn 11y ago
  My own experience just does not agree with this at all. First, I think we have to distinguish between two ideas here: * The first is the question of whether anyone can learn to program. I think that for the most part everybody can, just like for the most part everybody can learn high school calculus. * The second is the question of whether programming ability is bimodal. This is not related to the first question, and confusing the two questions is a significant error. It is entirely possible that programming talent is strongly bimodal and that 99% of people can learn to program. I've been programming since I was 11 and have interacted with other programmers all through high school, college, and now working life, and at every single point of my career -- both academic and professional -- I have seen that some people are drastically faster and better at programming than others (but the others are still capable of learning). In introductory programming courses at college, I've done labs with very smart people who took 10x longer to figure out the lab than some others. They figured it out, but they struggled a lot compared to others, despite being very distinguished undergraduates (Goldwater fellow, etc.). At work, we've brought on people with 10 years of experience who were 10x slower than someone else with 2 years of experience. At school, there were master's degree candidates who were significantly worse than many undergraduates despite working just as hard and longer. I could go on and on and on with examples. From my own life the evidence is simply overwhelming that programming talent is bimodal.
  • bkeroack 11y ago
    Is speed really the most important metric?
    • nilkn 11y ago
      It's not just speed. It's everything. They're not just faster -- their code is cleaner, faster, more elegant, and better according to most metrics you could think up.
      • zaphar 11y ago
        A measure of the elegance and cleanliness of code is so arbitrary in our industry that it's useless as a metric. Faster is concrete enough to be useful though.
• grandalf 11y ago
  There are different areas of skill. Some people can refactor a messy chunk of code into something more organized. Some can create a rough sketch of a large system that is well-organized and loosely-coupled, others can optimize an algorithm for efficiency. Some can write code that is easy to read and understand. And some can write code that is extremely abstract and expressive. It's rare to find all of these skills in one person. Depending on the project goal, some of the above are crucial and some are nice to have. All of the above can be learned, and for some experience is the best teacher, while for others a CS background helps a lot.
• mannykannot 11y ago
  I am well aware that there is a considerable range of ability among those who program professionally, but it never occurred to me to think of the distribution as being bimodal. I have also noticed a preference among programmers (or rather, more likely, a vocal minority) for reducing all issues to simplistic dichotomies (e.g. the methodology wars.) Perhaps this is just another straw man, distracting from the real issues of how to raise levels of performance incrementally and generally?
• SEJeff 11y ago
  A 10x programmer is one who teaches the rest of the team all of his skills, not one who is necessarily better than everyone else.
• jerf 11y ago
  There's a lot of scenarios that could produce what we witness, and eliminating one doesn't prove which of the others it is. It could be the case that programming talent is bi-modal or multimodal, but each mode is itself a normal distribution. There would be a "talent" involved, but it would still produce a normal distribution once you cut the bottom off. This is suggested by such things as the bimodal distribution on the handful of peer-reviewed papers that at least opened the question about whether incoming freshman could be sorted into "those who could get it" and "those who can't" buckets by a simple multiple choice question at the beginning of the test. (I do not claim they have solved the problem, but it is an interesting data point. This is that paper that was extremely widely misunderstood by professional programmers as being a test that required the students to guess in advance how things like "equality" worked in programming languages, when in fact it wasn't about being "right" about programming languages but about being able to form a consistent theory about how such things might work.) It may be the case that talent is single-mode normally distributed, but there's also a threshold necessary to function, which can be at any arbitrary point along the curve; I'd suggest evidence would suggest it's certainly above the average as with all due respect to my fellow humans it does not strike me as the case that more than half of the human race can simply become professional programmers. (This is less elitist than it sounds, because in many cases supply & demand is such that only the best can become professionals anyhow, and that's not just "NBA basketball players", it's even things like music composers or painters. If you are a 50%-th percentile composer, do not try to make a career out of it. I say this as one who has faced down this choice personally.) The resulting truncated-normal distribution of talent in the professional space would have a lot of people piled up on the bottom, being just barely able to cross over the talent bar, and then a long-tail effect where extremes would be more likely than you'd naively expect. Further, courtesy of the Central Limit Theorum, as this initially non-normal distribution of talent went through the usual random vagueries of life and professional career, it would be the case that the curve overall would become more normal, but would be quite likely to retain the longer tail and never be quite normal. This is suggested by the fact that this rather does sound like the programming world we live in. Further if we're going to go all social-engineering on the question, I'm not particularly interested in telling people pretty lies to make them feel good, or worse, make ourselves feel good about how good a person we are, while sucking them in to a career that does not suit them. If talent exists and matters, then it behooves us to say so and give people the ability to examine themselves with eyes open and ask if this is the right thing for them, or if they should pursue another career which they may find more satisfying. There is, of course, a lot of room for "average programmers", almost by definition, and "average programmer" already likely entails "above average talent when the whole population is considered".
• michaelochurch 11y ago
  The "10x" effect is real (not a "myth") but it has more to do with skills and exposure than innate talent. (It's also context-specific. I'm a 10x when I get to pick the tools, but a sub-1x on enterprise Java because I just can't bring myself to give a fuck about some Spring/Hibernate/POJO legacy mess.) That's what missed in this conversation. Yes, those mediocre Java programmers (CommodityScrumDrones) really are a drag, but it's not low IQ that has made them what they are, and they're not genetically destined to remain that way. That aspect of a person can change, and quickly. At any rate, I've met plenty of high-IQ people who are just awful programmers. Smart as hell, but really bad at writing code. I think that attitude is a major factor. If you think programming is important and genuinely want to learn it (and not just "good enough to get a job") then I think it's quite possible for a lot of people to learn how to do it well enough. Innate talent might matter at the extreme upper end of competitive programming. Just as most people can run a marathon with enough work, but very few will ever get below 3:00, I'd believe that the percentage of people who can reach the top in programming competitions is smaller than the percentage who can program adequately. So there's probably a talent ceiling there, just as there is in athletics. But real programming is more cooperative than competitive and there are plenty of factors (especially design sense and cross-domain knowledge) that matter in the real world more than innate talent. Programming has a steep learning curve, but what's missed is that a steep learning curve is a good thing. The 10x effect exists because it's possible (especially in the early stages) to improve your own effectiveness by 20, 50, or even 100+ percent per year... and one becomes a true 10x-er not based on in-born talent but by having several 1.5x growth years in a row.
• platz 11y ago
  "Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it" http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-fr... http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf
  • vectorpush 11y ago
    The findings of this study have been formally retracted by the author. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hu...
    • platz 11y ago
      Well I won't be linking that anymore. Anyways, I was really more interested in the little narrative observation above than the numerical results of the study.
      • sukilot 11y ago
        But the data showed that the narrative was bullshit. (Catch-22: believing the narrative puts you in the narrative's non-logical bucket)
      • sukilot 11y ago
        But the data showed that the narrative was bullshit. (Catch-22: believing the narrative puts you in the narrative's non-logical bucket)
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• vbezhenar 11y ago
  IMO it's not a talent. It's a result of thousands of hours of work. I learned programming at 12 years. I programmed a lot. I didn't have a computer and I was programming in sheets of paper (computer was in school and I didn't always had access to it). I wrote by own object-oriented GUI library in sheets of paper and that library was never written in computer but it was in my head and I learned a lot while thinking about it and its design. There was time when I was spending 10-12 hours programming or reading programming books. I wouldn't call myself talented programmer. I spent a lot of time to learn how to write good enough code and be productive. What I had is a passion to program. I never programmed because I had to force myself. I enjoyed it. It's a beautiful art. That beauty forced by to program. And I still find that beauty in programs. Unfortunately I don't know how to learn others to enjoy programming. I saw a lot of programmers and most of them didn't really like their job, they just did it because they went to CS faculty after school and programming is paid well enough.
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• kinduff 11y ago
  Very nice article. It reminds me to this quote from "Hackers and Painters" by Paul Graham. "In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it."
• notacoward 11y ago
  The illusion of a U-shaped talent curve is just that - an illusion. Specifically, it's an illusion brought on by selection bias. We see more of the people beyond a particular point in the curve. Maybe we even see them because they're exponentially more productive than people further back, but at most that means the work product distribution is bimodal. The skill or talent distributions surely have a bump or two here and there, but remain basically normal.
• bernardlunn 11y ago
  My experience totally contradicts this. I am a biz guy but I have been privileged to work with a handful (literally, about 5) developers who are not just 10x better than average but 50x or 100x better. Its like denying Black Swans - rare is different from non-existant.
  • piva00 11y ago
    I won't argue against that but I have a problem with biz guys who try to evaluate what kind of a developer someone is. I'll not judge that you don't have knowledge about the field or about code, so don't take this personally, but in my experience I've seen far too often some biz guys praise developers who are sloppy, developers who code unmaintainable stuff and which biz guys loves because they're always delivering, much of the time ahead of the schedule. But when you tried to bring a team around what they built it was almost always code that was not able to be maintained by a team. When the original developer was long gone you had a team of 5 pretty good developers trying to figure what the hell is happening with that code, and biz guys demanding to change the team because the 50x developer had done so much in less time. As I said, I'm not saying this personally as I don't know your background but if we are throwing anecdotes that's one I have from the top of my head, some praised hyper-productive coders are that way because they take shortcuts and some don't even know they've done it. I just think that the occurrence of really good and smart and productive developers is so low that I've yet to remember more than one that I've worked with in the last 10 years, I've worked with great people but I can remember only one who I can put in the bucket with a "great soft and hard skills, hyper productive and smart" label.
• bernardlunn 11y ago
  My experience totally contradicts this. I am a biz guy but I have been privileged to work with a handful (literally, about 5) developers who are not just 10x better than average but 50x or 100x better. Its like denying Black Swans - rare is different from non-existant.
• platz 11y ago
  maybe she said she "was not really a programmer" because she didn't want to be associated with one (consciously or not). I have heard that sometimes women view programming as a low-status job i.e. akin to labor.
• rayiner 11y ago
  In this topic: people demonstrate they don't know what "bimodal" means. A normal distribution of programming talent doesn't preclude the existence of "10x" programmers.
• Geee 11y ago
  I'd say that the 'talent' of programming comes from the tenacity to handle all kinds of bullshit and be able to adapt and survive in this environment. Just setting up a Python environment on Windows is a nightmare, and most people will just give up. Second part of the talent is the experience of how to handle or avoid all the bullshit and get the work done.
• PaulHoule 11y ago
  I think one difference between this lady who built a complex system and "a programmer" is that the typical professional programmer works on a legacy system.
• astrocyte 11y ago
  It's quite simple... There are people who have a knack/drive for understanding the world/universe and its many functions. People who care to understand the root mechanism as opposed to speculating about how the tree and leaves form. This is the base talent behind good software engineers who become great through experience and challenges. If you -truly- understand something, you are good at communicating it in many ways and capable of expressing it in a 'language'. What came first? Language or understanding. What do a lot of institutions teach? Programming. What don't companies want to invest in : Understanding....Mind the gap. You may be good at a language and still not have any good ideas to express;Programmer A lot of people fail to see this and go on with arbitrary measures of what makes a good software engineer. Oh nos', you don't know how to craft the perfect general expression for this. Oh nos', your Translation look-a-side buffer calculation was off... And so on. The typical interview centers on how well someone programs. People write long articles which stirs people into a frenzy and much is lost in the discourse. Mindless interview structures are administered which tests people on their ability to work through leaf problems. Tress of horrible construction are made and root analyzers are called in to save the day. Since there aren't many who fully understand root construction, such talent is hardly ever understood for its value : Modern software engineering at your alphabet soup of companies. And here we are. Much will never change because there are few actually looking at the root issues. Few actually care to. It's all about the leaves and low hanging fruit.
• aidenn0 11y ago
  I think the bimodal theory exists because we merely haven't learned to teach people without exceptional talent programming.
• golemotron 11y ago
  > This belief that programming ability fits into a bi-modal distribution (i.e. U-shaped) is both "dangerous and a myth". This myth sets up a world where you can only program if you are a rock star or a ninja. It is actively harmful in that is keeping people from learning programming, driving people out of programming, and it is preventing "most of the growth and the improvement we'd like to see", he said to a big round of applause. How does he know that bi-modality is not true? These are questions we should ask and study rather than things we should just assume are myths. Ignorance is not the answer.
  • leni536 11y ago
    Especially if one don't even define what is the exact quantity measured. IQ is a normal distribution by definition, (IQ-100)^(1/3) is "bi-modal", it's just a simple transformation and both quantity correlates (supposedly) with the vague term "intelligence". The question is not in bi-modality though, it's whether you can go from the left side to the right or the middle over time or you should have been born as a rock star.
• logicallee 11y ago
  >But that would mean that programming skill is somehow distributed on a U-shaped curve. Most people are at one end or the other, which doesn't make much sense. But this is exactly the case! It's why Fizz Buzz exists: to determine if you're on the left leg or the right of the U-curve. (Or similar curve wherein people "suck at programming" or that they "rock at programming", without leaving any room for those in between. Everyone is either an amazing programmer or "a worthless use of a seat" [in a programming job]). Why can't we accept that this is the nature of progrmaming? Jobs wasn't a coder, and was on the left side of the U. Wozniak was and was on the right side. Brian Chesky (airbnb co-founder) can't code, is on the left side of the U. Nathan Blecharczyk (another airbnb co-founder) can. There is nothing exceptional about this distribution. You can have a ton of vision and product input, design input (as Brian did) without being on the right side of the U as a coder yourself. On the other hand, perhaps all coders on the right side of the U are all awesome, which is why they command six figure salaries sooner out of college than other professions take to get a terminal degree in their field.
  • whyaduck 11y ago
    FizzBuzz is a test, not the results. If you can point to a study that has administered it to a well selected group representative of professional software engineers that displays a bi-modal distribution, then I'll accept that as evidence. Until then, it's just anecdotal data about the quality of a self-selected group attempting to get a well paid job.
    • logicallee 11y ago
      Fizz Buzz is a pass/fail test that wouldn't even exist if the pool being tested weren't bimodal. Why would anyone administer the Fizz Buzz test to a normal distribution of programming skills, for example? (I mean https://www.google.com/search?q=normal+distribution https://www.google.com/search?q=normal+distribution) It would make no sense - below what part of the normal curve of programmers would you put someone who failed at FizzBuzz (cannot code it)? In my interpretation it's because programming skill doesn't follow a normal (bell-shaped) distribution, but is bimodal. Which is why Fizz Buzz exists, to tell you quickly which pool (left or right) your candidate is from. Either that or we have a completely different interpretation of why Fizz Buzz exists or what it means. Why do you think it exists?
• vpeters25 11y ago
  > The truth is that programming isn't a passion or a talent, it is just a bunch of skills that can be learned I think people who makes these statements are usually misguided by their lack of perspective: talented people have a hard time understanding how someone else can't do it when "it's so easy" One example of this is Bill Gates driving Microsoft to commoditize programming ("I can do it, it's easy, therefore anybody should be able to do it").
• kfk 11y ago
  I think in small organization you might need a lot of talent, but once organizations (or projects) get bigger, you need process over talent and that, well, also means good management. There are things you can do with a small group and things you can only do with a bigger group. I guess Django is at a point where it's big enough that it can take advantage also from the less talented coders. Maybe, and I am wild guessing here, part of the issue comes when startups grow and still look for the 0.1% talents, when at that size that can easily live with the 40-50%.
• karmacondon 11y ago
  Programming talent isn't bimodal, in fact it isn't a question of traditional talent at all. There are only two levels of programming ability: "Bad" and "Good Enough". In all but the rarest of edge cases, everything else is a matter of preference. You think that someone's code is elegant, simple, clean, optimized, etc? That's great, but only other programmers might care about those things. The only question that the majority of people care about is, "Does it work?" Obviously code can be written so poorly that it causes noticeable performance problems, or doesn't work at a scale past the initial requirements. But that falls under the "Does it work?" question. Basically if I'm using it and it isn't annoyingly slow, whoever wrote it was "Good Enough". I don't care if they were a l33t 10X rock star ninja or some guy who just finished a "$language For Dummies" book. It is genuinely cool to see code that is well designed and well written. And doing that consistently does require the innate talent of a special mind. But let's not confuse elegance with doing the job. Doing the day in day out work of programming is like being a journalist: the most important thing is getting the facts straight, not writing something pretty. The truly talented can do it with the rhetorical flourish of a poet, which is awesome, but not required. All that most people ask of code is that it's good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. If we want to turn it into a poetry contest then it's definitely a bimodal distribution, and most of us will end up on the wrong end of the curve.
  • makeitsuckless 11y ago
    Your argument falls apart completely when you take the long term lifecycle of the code into account. Which is exactly why we keep having these discussions. And by the time we pay the price everybody cares. Of course, by then it's way too late to start caring about such esoteric programmer obsessions as elegant, simple, clean, and most of all: open to change. Yes, all people ask is code that is good enough to do whatever it's supposed to do. They just have no fucking clue of what it is that the code is supposed to be able to do besides satisfying their short term needs.
  • freyr 11y ago
    > "Does it work?" This speaks nothing about maintainability or extensibility, which can add great value to a product in the long term. These factors aren't a matter of style or aesthetics, and they go beyond simply getting code to work. > It is genuinely cool to see code that is well designed and well written. And doing that consistently does require the innate talent of a special mind. And we've immediately returned to the bimodal myth. I would say it comes from someone who (1) cares about the quality of their work, (2) has a sense of what constitutes good or bad code (a sense most often acquired through experience), and (3) has the foresight (also usually acquired through experience) to make early design decisions that pay off later. None of this requires an innate genius.
• VLM 11y ago
  WRT mythology, one important takeaway about the "1.5 million programmer job shortage" is the management declaring the shortage isn't looking for programmers, or white male programmers, or "rockstar ninja real programmers" but ivy league grads willing to sit thru 8 hour logic puzzle and coding interviews about linear algebra to work for $7.25/hr for minimum 80 hours per week in an open office packed in like sardines while people "work" by playing foozball for 60 hours per week next to you in one of the most expensive cities in the world for next to no stock options in a field rife with ageism where their career will be shorter than a typical NFL quarterback. But other than that, no problemo. In reality there's no shortage, and isn't going to be one, outside a couple industries in NYC and SV.
• markbnj 11y ago
  I've been at this twenty years, and I have no doubt that most people can learn to do it, and some people are just radically better at it. I'm not sure why those should be either mutually exclusive or controversial points of view. Where the passion part comes in is that most people, the vast majority I would think, just don't want to do this for a living and never will. We're a little like medical doctors in that respect. A lot of people would like to have an MD's paycheck but very few would actually enjoy doing what an MD does for a living. Another analogy, and one of my favorites, is to watchmaking. Watchmakers take great pride in the incredibly close work they do, and again while it may be work many could learn to do, it is work that few would want to do. I think this is very true of programming. Most people find it horribly tedious and boring, and don't see the creative aspects of it at all. The last thing I'd note is that the focused act of programming is becoming a smaller and smaller part of the gig. To be a full-stack developer these days requires so much more than the ability to create a working program. The big picture is very big, it takes many years to get a really sound grasp of it, and you have to be motivated in the first place. Passion, again.
  • hasenj 11y ago
    > To be a full-stack developer these days requires so much more than the ability to create a working program. The big picture is very big, it takes many years to get a really sound grasp of it This is a major point that tends to be overlooked by a lot of people. There's a big difference between just "coding" something to make a little feature work, and actually building an architecture that can support many kinds of behaviors now and in the future. Many people can't seem to make the jump to the "bigger picture" version of programming
    • markbnj 11y ago
      > Many people can't seem to make the jump to the "bigger picture" version of programming TBH I am not sure there is even a viable "smaller picture" version of programming. Sure you can write some simple scripts and compile some C++ or Java or run some python. But I have to think 99.99% of what you could actually make a living doing would require knowing a stack at least from the database up to the browser or desktop.
• sz4kerto 11y ago
  What is programming talent? There are many different jobs where one writes code, but they're very different. A very big part of a developer's success depends on whether and how they can navigate the business domain they're in.
• gmrs 11y ago
  The creativity part of programming requires a good sense of usability, a good sense of how to organize things nicely and those things require some sort talent yes. The same applies to language and grammatics. One thing is to write a phrase well, other thing is to transmit the right emotions with the phrase you write.
• Tloewald 11y ago
  Well let's start with fallacy #1 -- marathon times are normally distributed. http://m.runnersworld.com/sports-psychology/round-number-times-for-marathons http://m.runnersworld.com/sports-psychology/round-number-tim... Aside from the significant asymmetry of the distribution (of course) there's the spikes where people push themselves to hit a mark (i.e. 3:59 vs 4:00). Programming is full of weird incentives that will distort themselves in any measure -- e.g. if A gets his/her work done in 0:20 and B in 7:30 and A then goofs off or helps other coders, the measured productivity difference might not be huge. Since most people who code are having their behavior distorted by measurement that's a big issue. From experience -- the incentives against outperforming expectations are huge -- demonstrate you're 3x as productive as the guy next to you and from now on you have 3x the workload for 1.1x the pay. In practice what happens inisthe better coders pad their estimates and get trusted with tough problems rather than time-consuming problems.
• o_nate 11y ago
  It seems plausible to me that the distribution of innate programming ability is a bell curve, but the distribution of programming effectiveness is bimodal. The missing ingredient of course is experience and education. It's similar to an athletic skill, such as the high jump. If you plotted the maximum height that a random assortment of individuals could jump, the resulting graph would be bimodal: the top clump would be those who can do the Fosbury flop and the bottom clump would be everyone else. The innate ability to jump follows a bell curve distribution, but unless you know that trick, you'll end up on the lower clump.
  • weatherlight 11y ago
    That would be true if programming were just one thing.
    • o_nate 11y ago
      Sure, so multiply above example by the relevant number of sub-specializations within programming. Same principle holds.
  • weatherlight 11y ago
    That would be true if programming were just one thing.
• robotcookies 11y ago
  The story mentioning the woman who did not consider herself a "real programmer" is obviously disturbing. But that is not the consequence of believing in a bi-modal distribution of programming talent. Rather, it is the consequence of believing in a bi-modal distribution AND believing that gender also fits that distribution. The bi-modal distribution of talent is not a myth nor is it intrinsically harmful. However, it can be extremely harmful when misinterpreted to mean gender, race, etc. The author is subtly conflating the two and in the process doing more harm than good. This does not help women, minorities or other under represented groups.
• kaitai 11y ago
  Last summer I went into a job interview and said "I'm not really a programmer." The next week I was hired to do Ruby on Rails work for a freelance contract. (I'd been lured to the interview to talk about data analysis with R but they needed a Rails person more.) Clearly the interviewers thought my level of experience was fine. I've got a PhD in mathematics and am no stranger to technical fields. I can't believe I was "that woman" who said she wasn't a programmer. It really does happen. My G-d, I'm a cliche.
• trhway 11y ago
  by definition, most of us working in this crowded industry are mediocrity. And even if somebody is a very talented programmer (say like me :) the system will make sure that it doesn't matter in the end. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barge_Haulers_on_the_Volga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barge_Haulers_on_the_Volga (depicts typical implementation of SCRUM process with 1-day long sprints) (until of course, one is so "talented" that s/he made onto the barge as a foreman or better - owns the barge, though it usually requires completely different from programming talents)
• makeitsuckless 11y ago
  I know I'm not the only one old enough to remember that we already tried to apply this argument in the late 90s? That left us with countless completely incompetent programmers, most of whom left the industry after Y2K and the burst of the bubble. Those who stuck around now largely make up the bulk unemployed IT workers whining about how there can not possibly be any shortage because nobody wants to hire them. We've already put the talentless to work in massive numbers, and not only did we as an industry pay the price, it didn't do the por sods much good either. Also, all of these arguments about mediocre programmes, 10x programmers, gender based discrimination etcetera only serves to distract and intimidate, because they have nothing to do with the fundamental question. Nobody is arguing that a having a talent for something is the only thing that matters when it comes to how good a programmer you become, or that it has anything to do with gender. Bringing it up only serves to pre-emptively make anybody trying to make a counterargument look like an arrogant, sexist douche. My instinct tells me that people trying to make a point that way already know they're wrong.
• christianbryant 11y ago
  As Linus Torvalds said, "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." [0] Not to belittle the truisms in the article, but this is ultimately what it should come down to. Show me your code and your project working. [0] http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132 http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132
• dusklight 11y ago
  If you started programming when you were 12 and you've been programming for fun more than 4 hours a day every day since then, you are going to be drastically better than someone who starts programming in their first year of college and only does it to graduate. It feels like a bimodal distribution because you then get both kinds of programmers interviewing for jobs at the same age when they graduate from college and one of them is going to feel drastically different than the other.
  • Sevzinn 11y ago
    I'm curious if anybody who starts programming in college would ever write such a message. I think "dusklight" started programming around 12 and programs for fun more than 4 hours a day. I was doing x86 assembly as a teenager and perform terribly compared to at least one person who started in college.
  • stdbrouw 11y ago
    Don't underestimate by how much the speed at which you learn increases as you get older. There's lots of amazing musicians around who only started playing as adults, for example, because aside from a couple of kid geniuses, learning an instrument when you're young is just really, really hard.
    • brookside 11y ago
      Not sure I agree it's easier as you get older. Our brains seem to be wired to pick up new languages & skills most rapidly when in youth.
      • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
        Folks say that, but I think its mainly immersion. We are reluctant to spend the time/energy to immerse ourselves in a new thing when we're older.
        • bpyne 11y ago
          I'm not thoroughly sold on the "too old to learn" adage either. I think it has more to do with time and focus. Since moving into the stage of life in which I have a family and more responsibility in my job, I have considerably less time to focus on learning a new instrument or music theory or ______. I have no doubt that there is an age, beyond which, your brain has degenerated too much to learn. But, I'm not convinced it's as early as 50's or 60's. Hopefully, with better awareness about nutrition, exercise, and stress, we can see people learning music instruments well into their 80's.
• gyardley 11y ago
  The set of people who believe programming ability is bimodal and the set of people who believe they're in the higher of the two modes is pretty much identical.
• ebbv 11y ago
  Anyone who has dealt with Django should believe his claim to being mediocre. ;) Actually I think this is a good article which makes some good points, but I think it misses another harmful myth; that people are one thing all the time. It substitutes the idea that people are either good or bad programmers with good, bad or mediocre. But in reality, one person is not always good or bad or mediocre all the time. Someone might write brilliant code today on this project the are passionate about, but write shitty code next quarter on a project that doesn't have their interest. Or while they are distracted because something came up outside of work. Or because they are writing in a new, unfamiliar language and they don't realize the code is bad. Or any number of other reasons. Human beings are fluid things. Over time someone may develop an average quality of output, but that's only going to be something that comes about over time. And ultimately, I think it's somewhat meaningless. Since the average is not what you care about in any given case, and may or may not be applicable to whatever new thing comes down the line. Plus, as the article points out; how do you really define good or bad? Number of errors that get caught by unit testing on first submission or number of errors which don't get caught until the code is already in production?
• bad_user 11y ago
  What I find fascinating is the ability of software developers to work against their own interest. > The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2020 there will be a 1.5 million programming job gap, which means there will be that many jobs unfilled. That's in five years. The EU has published similar numbers, 1.2 million in 2018—three years. That means we need to be doing something to get more people into our industry. There you have it. That's how many of us are thinking, while at the same time we suffer from ageism, wage-fixing, working overtime and being seriously underpaid in general for the value that we provide to our employers. How can we be so stupid as to care about programming jobs being filled? Is it any wonder that we end up being abused?
  • srryaccntcrtn 11y ago
    A typical useful idiot grade remark by the speaker. Actually we as software devs have to ensure that the supply of talent in our field is somewhat balanced to our interests to protect our financial positions and prospects from degrading due to the influx of new devs on the job market. Supply and demand baby!
• mkr-hn 11y ago
  The importance of talent is often overstated, but it's not a myth. The years I spent trying to do software development were like beating my head against the wall. Everyone seemed to be much better than me, and it led me to give up after a few years of starting and stopping. If I couldn't even manage to make a simple application, what was the point when so many people made one every day? So I gave up and focused on other interests, like writing and art. Writing has served me well, but doesn't interest me enough to get much written. I'm just bad at visual art, no matter how much I practice and study. Fractal art is about all I can do[1]. Then I picked up a MIDI keyboard, a DAW (first LMMS, then Studio One) and had fun making music immediately. Haven't been able to stop since. Now I'm rediscovering my interest in A/V engineering. As you can imagine, knowing a little programming helps a lot with both of these things, and that's how I found an interest in writing code. Most of the code I wrote even before finding a need is solid, efficient, and secure. But that's because I'm so bad at it that I have to be careful. If I don't write clean, efficient code, I won't be able to understand it well enough to fix it when something goes wrong. I think we would be better off encouraging people to try many different hobbies rather than pushing them into something they have no affinity for. Then, when something clicks, show them how programming can make it better. [1] http://www.designbyhumans.com/shop/mkronline/ http://www.designbyhumans.com/shop/mkronline/
  • georgemcbay 11y ago
    This is all anecdotal but learning to program is (IMO) somewhat like math in that it is virtually impossible to learn it while not feeling confused and lost because there's a lot you have to internalize (and often this includes multiple concepts sort of all at once) before everything clicks and makes sense. Talent is a thing, surely, but IMO the primary "talent" when it comes to learning to code is having the mindset where being lost isn't a problem for you. Some people hate this feeling of not intuitively knowing what is going on (possibly for an extended period of time!) while others embrace it, the latter tend to be the ones who end up excelling at programming (and/or math). "Most of the code I wrote even before finding a need is solid, efficient, and secure. But that's because I'm so bad at it that I have to be careful. If I don't write clean, efficient code, I won't be able to understand it well enough to fix it when something goes wrong." If your code is good it is because you are a good programmer. Full stop. Not being able to understand and fix your own code if you aren't writing it cleanly (and as simply as possible while doing the job) is universal. "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" - Brian Kernighan
• parsnips 11y ago
  Poor analogy follows: Programming ability is like chess ability. The skill lay on a regular distribution, but the game that 1900 players play (top 5%) is much different than the mean (~1400).
• tmsh 11y ago
  I think it comes down to whether you have high standards. Or were taught with high standards. Or were mentored with high standards. And whether as you grow you have the luxury and the persistence to keep them up. If you do, you fold in stronger and stronger building blocks that over time 'scale' and allow one to move effectively and often more quickly. If you could measure it, it would have to do with the density of the parent tree nodes within which you approach problems. Some people are lucky to have grown under rigorous conditions while yet still being exploratory and developing breadth. If 'talent' is a function of tree node growth though, talent is not going to be bimodal. It's going to be unimodal with some long-tail bias because of the rewards theoretically of being really good at programming.
• kazinator 11y ago
  Programming benefits from dogged perseverance. If you have lots this trait, it can overcome other shortcomings. It also benefits from being thorough and detailed: analyzing all the cases that may occur, forming all the conceivable hypotheses and so on. It doesn't matter if it takes you five hours of hacking on something to finally see a solution that some brilliant programmer came to in 45 minutes of hacking. Maybe it was luck; his or her brain generated some spontaneous idea which revealed some aspect on the problem resulting in a breakthrough, while you were methodically working through various hypotheses (including the boring ones). Brilliance will lose in the long run to dogged perseverance and thoroughness. Brilliance has an advantage in dealing with badly structured programs; the brilliant mind has a great memory and can simultaneously hold a lot of the program in consideration: for example, to visualize a complicated run-time interaction between numerous scattered pieces of code. The more brilliant mind can handle a larger instance of this sort of thing than a less brilliant mind. But there is a limitation on it. It's kind of like being muscular. It's impressive that you can bench 300 pounds, but it's useless in the big picture where we might need to lift 30,000 pounds. And where we therefore use a machine to do it, and that machine can be easily operated by a "90 pound weakling". We can erase the advantage of the brilliant mind by not structuring the code such that only the most brilliant minds can visualize how some scenario arises in order to identify a problem. And we can also use tools: tool to help us visualize, analyze, validate, and so on. Where we ultimately need brilliance is in forming ideas. Someone who comes up with great product ideas (and ones that sell, too) cannot be replaced by a machine, or by someone who just has perseverance and thoroughness in the face of details.
  • krylon 11y ago
    Thank you! This is pretty much what I wanted to say, but I only realized this when reading your comment.
• hikz 11y ago
  That means we need to be doing something to get more people into our industry. Why? What's in it for me? The EU has published similar numbers, 1.2 million in 2018—three years I am a first-year CS student in Denmark and I hope you don't succeed in getting more people into the industry to fill those jobs before I graduate. The lack of (talented) programmers is going to put young CS/CE grads in an advantageous position both in term of salary and job opportunities. I am happy employers are having a hard time finding people to fill those jobs. That makes life easier and safer for me. The people screaming for more programmers here in Denmark are people in the government and Dansk Industri (lobby group representing bigger Danish corporations). The government cares about something they call "Denmark's global competitiveness" and the lobbyists in Dansk Industri want to flood the market so they can lower programmers' salaries. I don't care about the former line of buzzwords and the later is a hostile action taken against me as a programmer. Don't get me wrong. I care about our industry. I will contribute to open source in the summer leave and I am involved in organizing some monthly meetups. But in the end of the day I also want a job.
  • sqeaky 11y ago
    This is such a backward view of how the programming job market works that I am not really sure how to approach it. You can't really have too many programmers. Every field needs some degree of computer automation. As more gets automated innovations are made that will show us how to automate something that hasn't been automated in other fields. Until everything in every field is automated more programmers create more opportunity for even more programmers. I also think it is messed up to be selfish enough to hope your whole country suffers until you can secure a job.
• StillBored 11y ago
  1.5 Million position job gap? Really? I hate when people throw the us labor stats numbers around like that. Uh, hu, I wish these statistics would be backed up in a more through manner. Like maybe forcing companies to disclose how many applicants they get for a position and why they were rejected. I say this because, I recently interviewed for a position doing some pretty low level work, where apparently there were a 100+ applicants (or so the hiring manager said). But it was believable because the job was posted on linked-in, and linked in reported that 34 people applied for the job. So, a lot of people applied for the job, were they qualified? Well, considering I know two people with skillsets that are compatible with the position, and both are unemployed and live within 5 miles of the position, I would really like to see this kind of data industry wide. AKA, assign each candidate a number (only disclosed to the candidate), and then publicly post the number, and the reason for disqualification. Maybe if someone can figure out how, disclose the skills the candidate says they posses without directly correlating them to the candidates public profiles. That would give us an idea of where the skills gaps are, or even if they are real. Rejecting a bunch of candidates because "they don't fit the culture", or they don't have 5 years experience with CMVC, or perforce or some other tool not directly related to the specific job requirements needs to be public information. Or for that matter, that someone thinks they will ask for more money than the position pays, without making them the offer.
• KedarMhaswade 11y ago
  I think there is a question of progression through your career as well. For talented programmers, (I believe) it is less likely to feel 'stuck' at some point. Over the years, they can handle increasingly more complex challenges with same relative ease. Others have to do significantly more efforts to handle abstractions well enough to ensure 'cruising' along.
• perlgeek 11y ago
  One thing missing from the whole bimodal vs. normal distribution debate is: what is the population that you use as a base? If you take all humans as the base, the vast majority for any skill that isn't nearly universal is clustered at the zero. Of the 9 billion people on earth, nearly nobody can write programs to any meaningful degree, or play the piano to any meaningful degree, or build a telescope, or a wrist watch, or whatever. So I'd assume that programming ability distribution looks a bit like a normal distribution centered at zero, and cut off at zero (no values for skills less than zero). Which, ironically, makes basically everybody who can write a single line of code "above average". Which doesn't make them rock star programmers at all.
• chetanahuja 11y ago
  My wife and I volunteer teaching "programming" to my son's second grade class once a week. It's actually a mixed first/second grade room so half the kids in the class are first graders. I've been teaching them writing simple algorithms and games in scratch (scratch.mit.edu) and studio.code.org. These kids are young enough that almost nobody had any exposure to "coding" or algorithmic thinking before this. It's about 30 kids. Here's what I've observed (Yes it's anecdata... but I'm reporting my own impressions here): There are about 6 kids who're pretty quick on most of the assignments... evenly divided between 3 girls and 3 boys... then there's about 15-20 kids who are more or less similar in aptitude. The top 5-6 programming kids are also the kids who I feel have the most advanced verbal skills (just from speaking with them). I've been told by the class teacher that two of these kids are advanced math learners but the others are good students but not advanced beyond grade level. The more surprising part is the bulge of 15-20 students in the middle. That's a far bigger number than what I expected who regularly complete challenges correctly and within the time given. Many of these kids are not particularly top level math students. Most seem to have good verbal skills but nothing exceptional. Most surprisingly, many of these kids are first graders. Once I saw this in the first few classes, I significantly raised the level of challenges I was giving them. And they kept working them out. It's fair to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Yes it's not a particularly strong scientific study but I'm here to say that there's absolutely no way you can convince me that Programming ability is some genetic trait with a bimodal distribution... at least not in the absence of hard scientific data. The one study that has polluted our discourse for many years (because Jeff Atwood trumpeted it on his blog) was retracted in dramatic fashion by it's own lead author: http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion/ http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-... And to complete my story - Yes, there are 2 kids who don't particularly enjoy this class at all. They do seem to be behind the rest of the class in general scholastic aptitude though by no means "stupid"... my wife spent an extra hour with them separately and they thrived under a higher level of direct attention. There are a handful of others who end up doing their challenges slower than others. One of the most amazing and heartening things I've seen is that the kids who finish the challenges are spontaneously going to the kids who haven't and have been helping them out. And in the end, each and every kid has finished all the challenges we've given them
• random854 11y ago
  Based on what I've seen, anyone can write code, just as anyone can learn math or write a story. Further, anyone who devotes time and effort to writing code (or doing math or writing a story), who immerses themselves in it, who learns and practices, can write code well. Thing is, most people aren't motivated to do everything well. People find enjoyment in different ways; some through working with their hands, some through solving puzzles, some through talking to people. I wouldn't say this is purely natural (I didn't discover programming until later in life thus I'm nowhere near how skilled I'd be if I started at 10, although once I knew what it was I knew I would enjoy it), but I wouldn't say it's purely up to environment either. Anecdote: I introduced a friend of mine to programming recently. He can do it, and he's not bad at all, but he'd much rather be face-to-face with someone than staring at a screen for hours. So, anyone can become a good programmer, but most won't want to be.
• army 11y ago
  The original version of the "10x" idea didn't require the productivity distribution to be bimodal - it could be a bell curve or skewed bell curve with high variance. I think it's contextual as well - if you're working on a project that's just at the edge of your present abilities, your productivity is going to be pretty marginal compared to someone who's done it before and has strong aptitude at it. I think it's silly to simply sort programmers into two buckets. It does make a lot of sense though to try to attract and retain good programmers though - having a programmer who's at the 75th percentile of productivity instead of the 50th percentile is going to give you a big boost in productivity if productivity is high variance. It also makes sense to try to match programmers to projects that they have good aptitude and motivation for.
• mikecmpbll 11y ago
  Yet more programmer/tech industry denigration propped up by completely unproven assertions. Firstly most of this is based on the idea that as a programmer you are only either great or shit, and that this is somehow a problem of the industry rather than just being something entirely human and normal in ANY WALK OF LIFE (the best and the rest). Secondly, there's this awful assertion that this purported industry problem has resulted in a less diverse industry. (What does that even mean, other ethnicities & women can't handle pressure as well as white men?) But imagine how frustrating it must be to be a woman with a decade of experience and have someone assume that she doesn't know what she is talking about. ^ This just comes out of nowhere, someone assuming that a woman programmer "doesn't know what she is talking about" is not related to any point he's made previously.
  • sandyarmstrong 11y ago
    It's not out of nowhere. The context is very clear in the video, and in the article it's just a few paragraphs earlier: > When we see someone who does not look like one of those three men, we assume they are not a real programmer, he said. Almost all of the women he knows in the industry have a story about someone assuming they aren't a programmer. He talked to multiple women attending PyCon 2015 who were asked which guy they are there with—the only reason they would come is because their partner, the man, is the programmer. "If you're a dude, has anyone ever asked you that?"
• BurningFrog 11y ago
  After a few decades programming professionally I have yet to encounter the idea of a U shaped talent curve where most people are either geniuses or useless. Does anyone actually think that? Nor have I been on any team since arriving to California that had a majority of young white men. That actors portraying Mark Zuckerberg look like him is hardly surprising or a good scientific sample. I didn't read past that section.
• laurentoget 11y ago
  the comments on this are a fascinating read. who knew programmers had such a deep belief that their ability is rooted in almost magical notions of talent, art, creativity and is not just another skill you can learn. it is definitely a satisfying notion to think of your activity as a consequence of a god given gift, rather than just a job, but as engineers i think we should do better than relying on anecdotes and beliefs to understand what it is we are doing it.
• vfrogger 11y ago
  I took one programming class my Freshman year in college, and dropped Computer Science as my major because even though it was an Intro to Programming class, I felt like I was the only person in the computer lab that was actually programming for the first time. It infuriated me working for half a day on an assignment and then watching these other kids come into the lab, knock out the assignment in 20 minutes and laugh about how easy the assignment was. After college, I taught myself how to build websites, which led to javascript, then PHP, then databases. Teaching myself on real world projects was enjoyable because there was no comparison to anyone next to me, it was just me trying to figure out how to get something to work. And when it worked, that felt great, not horrible because it took me 10 times as long as someone else.
• retrogradeorbit 11y ago
  I think Jacob is engaging in sloppy thinking. Like everything relating to biology (in particular, human beings) there are two components. One is nature. One is nurture. Every single activity in life will require both components to come together. Everyone will have different aspects and amounts of these components. It reminds me of Jane Elliot's teachings. It's not that 'there is no difference'. There is definitely a difference. The truth is that difference is good. It's good that we have both good and bad programmers. It's good that some people are rockstars, and others have to struggle. Diversity is good. The problem is not "the 10x myth". I don't think its a myth. I think there are 10x althletes, 10x doctors, 10x engineers. Pick any field and the spread between the best and worst performers will be enormous. The real problem is some people think that because they are a better programmer (or a better pianist, or athlete, or engineer, or doctor) they are better people. That their life somehow has greater meaning. This is the myth that needs to be debunked. Being a 10x programmer does not make you a better person. In ANY way, what-so-ever. It just makes you a better programmer. What makes you a better person, in my opinion, is how compassionate you are, how much you care for the less fortunate and how much you work to make this world a better place for everyone.
  • collyw 11y ago
    Sadly I would say the same applies to money, many high earners seem to think that it makes them better people, when often it seems to be the opposite. I also think there are 10x environments that allow you to thrive as a programmer, as I have personally found my workplace to allow me to be around 4-5 times more productive on a quiet day when I am allowed to focus, over a normal day with constant interruptions. Add in some people you could learn from and I could easily see 10x productivity gains from one environment to the next.
  • NhanH 11y ago
    The problem about 10x myth seems to be the comparison point that each of us is making: is it the best vs worst, best vs average, or a binary threshold between the best vs everyone else? And then even defining the "worst" seems to be very hard for a field like programming. And a bit of a tangent, I don't disagree with your last statement in the specific. But in principle, that's a very dangerous statement to make: if you're living within the moral constraint of a society, there really should NOT be any criteria that define a human to be a better or worse person.
• current_call 11y ago
  If we embrace this idea that "it's cool to be okay at these skills"—that being average is fine—it will make programming less intimidating for newcomers. If we embrace this idea that "it's cool to be okay at these skills"—that being average is fine—it will make art less intimidating for newcomers. If we embrace this idea that "it's cool to be okay at these skills"—that being average is fine—it will make music less intimidating for newcomers. If we embrace this idea that "it's cool to be okay at these skills"—that being average is fine—it will make writing less intimidating for newcomers. If we embrace this idea that "it's cool to be okay at these skills"—that being average is fine—it will make football less intimidating for newcomers. If we embrace this idea that "it's cool to be okay at these skills"—that being average is fine—it will make architecture less intimidating for newcomers. There's nothing wrong with a skill that takes time and effort to become good at, and there's no reason to cater to people who aren't at least novices. Well, not unless you're trying to artificially inflate the labor pool so you can pay programmers less.
• eranation 11y ago
  Saying that there is a programming skill is a little like saying that someone has a "sports" skill. There are many different skills of programming that are very different, and except some basic "can do fizzbuzz" level, there are miles apart skillsets, where you can be great in one context but bad in another. a few examples - fast hacking / programming contest / hackathon skills - write correct solution fast, not caring about how the code looks or be read later. (great for contests, bad if you do it also at work, code is read more than written bla bla) - software engineering / organization skills - for 99% of enterprise software development, and large chunk of CRUD based web development, you need to be organized, and clean, there are no "algorithms" to implement, you just need to have good concept of MVC, separation of concerns, write methods that do just one thing, meaningful variable names. in these settings, most of the code you write is simpler than even a fizzbuzz, you get data from a form, validate it, save it, do some business logic, generate reports, that's it. This needs a whole lot different skillset than what a "top talent X10 programmer" would offer. This needs planning, design, patience, not trying to change the world, being OK with writing Java annotations, being just a regular professional software grunt. - Library and API designers - there is a great skillset of writing a library that has self explanatory interface, good documentation, and is just a fun to use. People who know how to build a DSL or an API that makes sense, is a whole different skillset than the above 2, and a fizzbuzz test will not be the one that will let that diamond shine in an interview. Programming is not just one skillset just like "music" or "sports" or "writing" is not a single skillset. You can be a great comic actor but a lousy dramatic one, you can be a great sports writer but never be able to get a novel published. you can be a great golf player but never be able to win your 10 year old kid playing soccer no matter what you try. Perhaps FizzBuzz is the common denominator, e.g. you can say that if someone can't play a C major chord on a piano, they are not going to be a pro musician, but anything beyond that, anything that tries to test "programming skill" beyond that level is not far from auditioning a violinist on a chelo just because both have strings.