The benefit of talented engineers comes from the fact that they avoid costly pitfalls - not that they pump out more code per hour worked.
I feel this "10x programmers are a myth" attitude comes from a good place of wanting to promote harmonious working and skill-up junior engineers, but it seems so totally detached from reality. I'm not sure the "benefit" of propagandizing against talented assholes is worth the cost of demotivating people who might be inspired that they could become a 10x engineer.
I think the pushback against 10X programmers comes primarily from the fact that many programmers who look good to managers (constantly push out new features) are in actuality an albatross around the necks of the other programmers who constantly have to fix the messes they create (in reality, a negative on team-wide production). What matters more to me in a teammate than how productive they are is to ensure that they are on the positive side of the scale at all, which the perceived 10X programmer is often actually a failure at.
Though I’ve definitely met people who just have such a wide knowledge base and think so quickly that they are in fact 10X as effective as a standard productive programmer, so I do understand where the idea comes from.
> In 1988, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed that the widely cited achievements of Stakhanov were puffery. The paper insisted that Stakhanov had used a number of helpers on support works, while the throughout was tallied for him alone. Still, according to the newspaper, Stakhanov's approach had eventually led to increased productivity by means of a better work organization, including specialization and task sequencing
Exactly the same discussion, except there it was tonnes of coal which can be easily and unambiguously measured. But they can't be easily attributed. How much of his work was really that of his team? And how much of it was simply inflation by his managers for propaganda purposes? And how much of it was, underneath all the propaganda, real process improvements?
At the same time, if one compares shoveling coal and laying bricks with software, then it'd be good to smash and destroy bricks, throw the coal back into the mine, raze houses. (Reducing the amount of code)
Software would be more comparable to designing the coal mining site, or architecturing a city (but not building it). And then maybe it's simpler to see, that individuals sometimes can have much impact.
Not just avoid pitfalls, being able to put together a good architecture is a huge factor as well. The effect is cumulative. If you have a good design to begin with, everything becomes easier with less risk of bugs. The result is that implementing new, or changing existing functionality takes less time.
The 10x developer doesn't write 10x as much code, (s)he will probably write less code than the 1x developer.
Instead of writing entire systems from scratch, maybe you have enough experience or familiarity with well known techniques and libraries to ship faster.
Or better yet, remove code.
It doesn’t matter if I have better experience or I can contextualise intent better; the phrase “10x” means it would take a team of 10 to do it, in the time, scope, budget (whatever).
But there are major reasons this could be the case, if I’m on my own and I know the direction then I don’t have to quibble about what framework to use, how to name my variables, what I consider “proof of concept quality”. You just get your head down and do it with the entire scope and progress in your head at once.
No infighting about semantics, no deeply technical progress reports or trying to subdivide tasks which are not inherently subdividable.
More people is more communication and it’s quadratic.
I'm sure there are engineers that can create an architecture 10x better than mine.
But show me someone that can create UI 10x faster and I'll admit they're a God.
Some things can't be 10xed after some point. It just takes work.
Some things can be 10xed and some just can't. I find it silly to think someone can be overall 10xer at everything.
Yes, because that's how it's always presented. And if it's not, then it's also a myth because then it's not a 10x dev, it's 10x context, background understanding, and experience.
Either way it doesn't hold water.
A person who is able to build 10x context, background and understanding is a 10x developer. Most people lack the ability to do that. Your post makes it seem like you could give those traits to anyone easily, but it doesn't work that way building the right mental models and being able to generalize your knowledge are key factors in talent.
And how good your autocomplete tools are, or you repertoire of code based to copy from.
When comparing juniors you observe the same distribution.
I've met 10x straight out of college who ran around other new grads.
