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I've got a sadder story. A client who I worked with has a great programmer (10x if you want.) He is so efficient that for years it just made sense to hand him a

I've got a sadder story. A client who I worked with has a great programmer (10x if you want.) He is so efficient that for years it just made sense to hand him a problem and let him solve it with code. The problem is that now, a few years later they have all these custom coded solutions for the things as standard as a DNS server and the rockstar programmer is unable to balance his responsibilities to maintain everything. It's a complete mess and inhibiting the client from getting anything done. Other parts of the organization had more mediocre programmers, but they tended to adopt standard, 3rd party supported solutions because of that. At this point, they are in better shape then where the 10x programmer has been working. The moral of the story is that being a great programmer isn't enough (or even that important) a large amount of the time. The secondary moral is that context is important. The 10x programmer in this story probably should have been in a faster moving sector than central IT for a large institution.

marktangotango 11y ago
>> The problem is that now, a few years later they have all these custom coded solutions for the things as standard as a DNS server and the rockstar programmer is unable to balance his responsibilities to maintain everything. The implicit error here is that the perception of this guy being great was flawed from the start. Anyone implementing one offs instead of adopting standard solutions is incompetent, pure and simple. He was't 10x, he was -100x.
- topkai22 11y ago
  Which I think was a different view on the same point as the article- you can have a successful career and make major contributions to our field even if you are a "mediocre" programmer. This is the converse- being a rockstar programmer isn't enough to be a great contributor.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  This just illustrates how arbitrary the concept of a "10x programmer" is. Is a programmer 10x because they are individually extremely good at programming? Or are they 10x because they always couch their decisions properly in a sustainable corporate strategy?

marktangotango 11y ago

>> The problem is that now, a few years later they have all these custom coded solutions for the things as standard as a DNS server and the rockstar programmer is unable to balance his responsibilities to maintain everything. The implicit error here is that the perception of this guy being great was flawed from the start. Anyone implementing one offs instead of adopting standard solutions is incompetent, pure and simple. He was't 10x, he was -100x.

topkai22 11y ago
Which I think was a different view on the same point as the article- you can have a successful career and make major contributions to our field even if you are a "mediocre" programmer. This is the converse- being a rockstar programmer isn't enough to be a great contributor.
snowwrestler 11y ago
This just illustrates how arbitrary the concept of a "10x programmer" is. Is a programmer 10x because they are individually extremely good at programming? Or are they 10x because they always couch their decisions properly in a sustainable corporate strategy?