True, but even the most mundane environment has a lot of problems that are better solved by making things simpler rather than managing the complexity better.
Re:The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
by crdoconnor on Wednesday May 03, 2017 @02:52AM
(#14253577)
A lot of "developer brilliance" is simply avoiding the inevitable slowdown that happens when projects mire themselves in technical debt.
I've worked on plenty of projects where two smart developers would have massively outperformed the 10-12 mediocre and highly risk-averse developers working on the shitty (gradually getting shittier) code base over a period of 6 months.
For greenfield I don't think 10x productivity is likely though. If you're testing an idea you might throw away, cheap and cheerful will do.
Re:The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
by tonyedgecombe on Wednesday May 03, 2017 @04:15AM
(#14253895)
On many of the projects I worked on there were two smart developers doing all the work and 10-12 mediocre developers doing almost nothing.
documentation and customer support can really hurt a young product organization, and these are not solved by brilliance, but rather diligence and patience.
Re:The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
by Nomentatus on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @03:19PM
(#14249665)
But it's also true that a good design can reduce documentation needs (and documentation/code fragility) by a startling amount - not to mention stop floods of customer support calls before they start. It's certainly true that not every job is a design or analyst job; but you'd better not be wrong about when you need a design task done, and the 1x programmer (or boss) can't make that judgement call for you.
This is my core complaint. All software development is (eventually) rate-limited somewhere other than developer brilliance. Most business software hits this limit fast.
A huge portion of business software is stuff you can't solve with brilliance - tasks from integrating with other companies to building out simple new features happen at the speed of spec development, email responses, or other non-development limits.
If the 10x myth makes employers expect 10x productivity from certain devs, or even 5x, it's badly misleading them. Not always, there are compiler companies and ML firms and whatever else that need brilliance, but I think most companies that advertiser for 10x developers are usually limited by forces 10x development can't help with.