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.

Yes but I think the underlying issue is that some people really Really don't like to acknowledge (or are unaware) there's a small set of elite programmers that can do things average coders can't. But any label we use to describe them (i.e. "10x", "rockstar", "ninja", etc) will be psychologically distasteful. I previously commented about that effect:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13753178

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24753594

To see that hidden psychology driving the narrative... look at how the author constructed his comparison with extra qualifiers of "competent" & "similarly experienced" : ">The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly."

In other words, if we artificially construct the comparison by a priori assuming both programmers are equal, then the 10x difference is a myth. Well yes, that's tautology. If you invent a sentence to "prove" a point, you can set any conditions in the artificial universe in your favor that seems to support it.

However in the real world, the stack of resumes will have a candidates with wildly different skill levels. Some struggle with Fizz Buzz. Some can write a 3d game from scratch. But it's impossible to create a label to describe that wide gap which also doesn't invite bikeshedding on that label.

EDIT reply to: >"Why can't we call them master programmers?"

Because we'd still have endless bikeshedding of the label "master" as in "Master programmers are a myth..."

Vermeer, Beethoven and Shakespeare are masters of their crafts. The same word we use for skilled tradesmen. Why can't we call them master programmers?

A master craftsman will solve a problem quickly, efficiently, and elegantly, combining insightful attention to detail with speed and effectiveness.

A master creator will produce work of lasting relevance and power. The metric is quality and impact, not speed and efficiency.

Occasionally you get people like Mozart who combine elements of both, but they're exceptionally rare. And they work best in a relatively limited context which they have mastered completely. They're not perpetually chasing the latest shiny. (Mozart basically knew one style. Even he would struggle to master all the languages and genres that are common today.)

Turing would likely have made a poor backend developer, but he produced work that had lasting impact.

A typical 10X developer will be more like a master builder than a master computer scientist.

I don't find the labelling offensive, because it's clearly realistic. Some people are just very, very good. They produce clean, tight, code at speed, far more quickly than muddlers who produce reams of mediocre code which creaks along, breaks when you look at it, and doesn't actually solve the problem.

But a 10Xer isn't going to be good at everything. If they mostly do backend, they're not going to go toe to toe with game devs. Etc.

In the programming industry, there's likely a bias more toward younger people, and hiring offices ask for the world. They'd like a whole staff of masters and rockstars. Though that doesn't preclude "older" people from being known as masters either. Take John Carmack or Jonathan Blow, for example.

Something else than thirty years ago, because presumably he has developed since then.

I think that was why GP suggested "journeyman" for younger people, because otherwise there's nothing to differentiate young "masters" from masters honed by thirty years of additional experience -- except adding the whole phrase "with thirty years of experience", which is pretty clumsy.

How many times faster is a developer who can write a compiler over one who can not?

We are at least consistent; I rather frequently see programmers claiming a "105 times faster!" benchmark that was actually the result of a fundamental complexity change.

Not everything is on a linear scale.

The first one was not a bad person by any means, but had no social skills, no ability to communicate and often just forged ahead building great stuff on his own. Entire areas of the software were entirely conceived and created by him, and it was difficult to even grasp what he was doing while pair programming with him. In a day he would write more tests and get more coverage than the rest of us would create in a week.

The second one had come from a FAANG-ish place where he was extremely successful, but didn't want the money or stress. He was extremely kind, considerate and great at communicating. Pair programming with him was a joy and he helped everyone else on the team grow. I'm confident he could have created entire regions of the software on his own, but he knew that wasn't the right thing to do. He would often ask questions until someone else on the team could solve a problem, even though I'm sure he knew how to solve it easily himself.

The amount of obscure waste of programming complexity made us actually just abandon the thing he spent years on to just not do it. And everything works fine and we still make money and we're just probably a little bit less clever about how we do it. We also have a lot more time to listen to users and solve their problems, rather than gloat on our genius and solve our own created problems :D

Your second example is inspiring and I hope to meet one to learn from too !

Both qualitatively and quantitatively, their output is at least 10x of a typical developer at a typical company, not even counting everything these people do besides writing code. Many more are not famous but are in the same league of impact/productivity - I'm genuinely puzzled how someone can say such people do not exist.

I've worked with a guy who wrote great code like he was typing an email.

Everyone has a ceiling of the complexity of problems they can handle, some programmers are outliers in this regard.

I believe 10xers exist within a business or technical context. This isn't limited to the field of computer science, but even traditional engineering (Edison) and sciences (Newton) have plenty 10x examples.

And yes, there are "10x" teachers, investors, lawyers, storytellers, sales folks, etc. Similarly, the distribution of talent that helps with "software development" might have a very long tail, leading to extraordinary performance versus the median.

Or they come in only every other Monday and contribute as much as a median Dev working full time?

It just doesn’t seem reasonable at all, at least if we read it literally.

I have worked with and met great, outstanding, developers who are much better than me. Some of them famous. None of them are anything close to 10x as productive, and I’m not particularly great. They’re much smarter than me, for sure, but they’re not 10x as productive.

I think you have a false dichotomy here. Carmack isn't 10x better a C or assembly than me. But in his domain he's easily 10x smarter and more productive than me.

And on top of that, he has a quarter century more experience in graphics programming than me. That shit accumulates.

Yes, actually. In graphics programming, from 2D and software rendered, to OpenGL and VR, you could give him and me (and presumably you) any task achievable in a few human decades, and he'd do it more than 10x faster.

"Graphics programming" is not a small niche, and yes in that space he's a 10x programmer.

I think you're thinking of this the wrong way. I agree that for something as simple as "build some websites", yeah, 10x is going to be very hard. You're then just turning specs into code, pretty much.

10x programmers are those that don't waste 9 months. The hard part is knowing which 9 months out of 10, which 9 ideas and components out of 10, is waste.

For "build a web forum" or something, yeah there are no 10x programmers. Though there are many many 0.1x programmers still.

I'm not a games programmer. I doubt a median games programmer would take 10x the length of time that it would take any other games programmer. It just seems implausible, and I don't know why people want to defend it.

I think in any field where you have a deep domain with complex, difficult constraints, it is entirely possible to have programmers with 10x the effectiveness of the median simply because of their greater domain expertise. They know the unique algorithms, data structures, design patterns, hacks, tricks, hardware quirks, tools, debuggers, code smells, etc. All of that has a huge compounding factor when it comes to output.

Here's a story I like to tell:

I joined EA shortly after the PS2 came out and worked at the studio that made Madden. Madden was a launch title on the PS2 (meaning it shipped right as the PS2 hardware did) and that version essentially sealed Madden's success. It was hugely successful.

But making a launch title is really hard. You're developing softare for a hardware platform that is itself in flux. When EA first started working on Madden PS2, they didn't have any dev kits to work on. I don't know if dev kits even existed. They needed to write code that they couldn't compile and run. But if they didn't start immediately, they would never be able to get the game done in time for the launch.

They had a guy on the team with a reputation for being a wizard. He took the MIPS R5900 reference manual, and disappeared into an office with blacked out windows for some number of weeks. When he re-emerged, he had written a PS2 emulator despite never having access to an actual PS2. The rest of the team were able to compile and run the game on that emulator so that they could make progress until eventually real dev kits arrived. From what I heard, when the real hardware showed up, the game actually ran on it.

Now, some of this legend may have grown in the retelling (it was already legendary by the time it was told to me), but I worked with that engineer a few times and I can vouch for his incredible ability to get stuff done. I remember once when FIFA was having performance problems and couldn't get their framerate high enough to ship. He was called into to help and a few days later, got it up to a solid 30 FPS. This was even though the team's own engineers had been trying to make progress and he had never touched the code before.

I think people dislike the mythos of 10x engineers because it's interpreted as some sort of cognitive essentialism. But I think most of it is just really deep domain expertise. Instead of talking about "10x engineers", we should talk about 10x at what.

The amount of innovation, from applied BSP, Zbuffer tradeoffs, light maps with interpolation, interleaved FPU corrections for texture mapping, multiplayer protocols (qtest used TCP), brush-levels, etc...

Before ID software did these things, they weren't checkboxes for what to do. After, sure. But the hard part of programming is not typing.

The median programmer would not have been able to do it before it had been completely irrelevant. The median games programmer could do it in 2005. In 1993-1996? Not a chance.

The main competitor to Quake was Duke Nukem, which technologically was just "doom and a half". The enemies were sprites, ffs.

ID software was years ahead of every other games developer.

The reason other games licensed the Quake engine wasn't that it was cheaper than doing it yourself, it was that they couldn't do it.

Edit: granted, I have a low opinion of the median programmer. But sometimes in life you meet people who, with things you think you're actually pretty good at, just completely mop the floor with you without even trying (or showing off). It's humbling.

Then why did all those thousands of other game programmers fail at creating a decent 3d game, before Doom was released? It's not like Carmack was the only one trying.

Almost definitely not 10 years.

And if you had, it would have taken you more than 10 years to realize what the right thing is, and to solve all very complex problems that showed up on the way.

Quake doesn't even have any load times! Not even with the hardware available at the time.

The more software development work approaches touch-typing, the less difference between 1x and 10X — strict Jira tickets in, garbage out, maybe slightly faster. Spec-work, and most grunt-work, is undifferentiated and does not benefit from a 10X person. The more your work approaches poetry - such as exercising user empathy, improving the architecture, considering UX, respecting performance constraints, understanding user's jobs to be done, and improving your implementation around that - the more creative space there is for 10X to reveal itself.

Ironically enough your example is flawed: there are documented 10x touch-typists.

The realities of the court system place high demands on the typists; the minimum required typing speed is already quite high: trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively[1] - and some exceed the minimum and go for 300 wpm. Even better, the official record for American English [is] 375 wpm [2].

Compare that to the average typing speeds around 30 - 40 wpm [3] Granted, the court reporters use specialized input devices (stenotypes) - but hey, the same can be said about highly productive programmers, who use specialized development environments - and sometimes also specialized input devices.

--

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype

[2] ibid.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing#Speed

I've had good luck discussing the subject back in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464807 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6465175, with the insightful replies.

Wow, reading the discussion from back then shows how much HN changed in spirit.

But that's where all the value is! Step 1 of being an exceptional worker is not to do unexceptional work if you can at all avoid it.

> at least if we read it literally

This is where it does fall down. There isn't an X that you can reliably measure 10 of, it's all very subjective.

Basically, the majority of programmers.

I mean if the code base is quite good and is kept that way, then a normal developer can deal with it quite well. But if you get a legacy mess, then the hard-core developer can make really drastic changes that have enormous value to the maintainability, future development and bug-wise.

If a normal developer tries to tackle that mess, it's easy to get into trouble and drown in the sea of opportunities and not see the big picture and take a proper road plan to improve things.

So in a way -1 developers enable the top developers to show the gap between them and the normal devs.

* Documentation

* The debugger / print()

Becoming a 10x developer means that you have a set of skills that work well together in an end to end process from going to initial requirements to fully fledged architecture and/or code.

That's not what I think 10x'er is though. I think a 10x'er is someone who enables the 'average' developer to become a 2x, 3x, 4x developer. This can be through writing some core tech, a library used by all, or through mentoring and guidance. The 10x'er can then become a 100x or even 1000x developer. The 10x dev is the person who picks up the really difficult or ugly stuff and says: "Hold my beer, I'll get that done" - motivating the team and helping them to keep velocity. They lead by example and explain to the team why they've taken the approach they have.

Sometimes people use the term Rockstar to define a 10x developer. I think that's a loaded term that comes with an 'arrogance' tag. The true 10x developers shouldn't be arrogant (beyond the base level arrogance everyone of ability has), they can and should be the glue that holds a team together and helps everyone achieve more.

Developer: a person that creates software.

10x development: a person that does it 10x faster.

What you describe, I'd simply call a lead developer since making other developers 2x or more is a lead developer his job.

If you're a developer and you're doing this, then it'd be one argument to get promoted to lead.

Also, if you really are a 10x dev, the one I know works in the HFT space. He's making bank. I'm not sure if that's your thing, but I've noticed they seem to appreciate 10x devs a lot more than any other company out there (and that includes FAANG).

If he was to just write code he'd be a 10x'er, with the other work he does to help his colleagues, he's many times more than that.

The problem with that definition is that it tags the coveted 10x label onto the problematic cases mentioned in the article: that guy who is able to hack together POC code that he demos and passes off as the solution, but requires a whole team to fix and to rewrite and to rearchitect to get it to actually work and be production-ready and be maintainable.

Inadvertently, this means that we see the 10x label being tied to observable behaviors that are actually a productivity nightmare just because they go from zero to demo in record time.

Well, speaking honestly probably more like 5x, but it would take a solid 5 person team working well together to do the same things he did.

His ability to reason about the problem- get to the root of the persons actual issue, proof of concept intitial revision and iterate until it was better quality than most popular open source projects was honestly awe inspring.

His only problem was his own lack of self confidence. He used tools and always asked if they were really the best or if he was inflicting them, had good reasons for not using things that we consider industry standard (he prefers restructured text over markdown because it’s more expressive, for example) but was ultimately very sad about every project he made because he felt like he had inflicted his (good) work on the world.

So, idk. The people who think they are rockstars probably not. He definitely didn’t think he was but he was a god to me.

> The problem with that definition is that it tags the coveted 10x label onto the problematic cases mentioned in the article: that guy who is able to hack together POC code that he demos and passes off as the solution, but requires a whole team to fix and to rewrite and to rearchitect to get it to actually work and be production-ready and be maintainable.

As I said in another comment. I've met one 10x programmer. So I consider him to be the archetype 10x programmer since he's the only visible proof I have. We're good friends, we mostly talk about life. I sometimes see him code. Let me assure you, he is the last guy that would hack together POC code. I know this, because I'd be one of the first to do that and he gives me a lot of flack for that when I show it to him xD

I should have left out the "or" in my definition. He knows how to architect, he knows how to code, he micro-optimizes every nano, is capable of understanding how underlying ISAs are doing their thing. He knows how to reason well. At companies where he'd enter as a junior, he was immediately recognized for having better technical skills than people 10+ years their senior (note: not his social skills, those are simply normal).

They exist. And it's easy to see why 10x programmers exist. Take a bell curve of ability and you find many 10x'ers on many scales of ability.

Or would you argue that people like Einstein was not a 10x physicist, or that Euler wasn't a 10x mathematician? And there are many more that I wouldn't even know of.

10x programmer is very related to the idea of a genius, in my opinion. It's simply a subset of it.

Feel free to disagree. It's good to see other perspectives.

And for that task, factors like how well a developer knows the libraries, how fluently they can express themselves in the language, how fast they can type, how seamlessly their mental model fits with the tools available.. all of those things can make the difference between it being something one dev can crank out in a couple of days, and another dev takes a few weeks over.

And I definitely want more of the first kind of dev on my team than the second kind.

But here’s where that doesn’t match up to what we expect of lead developers and more senior devs as their careers advance, and why ‘10x’ is not necessarily an indicator of ‘ready for promotion’.

The person who can see the whole problem and turn it into code in 2 days often struggles to figure out how to scale what they do to more people. They can’t express how the code should work to someone else because they’re already three steps ahead - explaining how it needs to be done will take longer than just doing it!

So the problem is as soon as this person encounters a problem that is too big to fit all in their head and crank out in a few days, or that requires expertise they don’t yet have, so they need to collaborate… the approach they have learned to rely on stops working.

But it turns out there are 10x team leaders too - devs who can break large projects up into chunks that can be delivered separately, who make sure the team is building the right thing, who know how to make use of that individual who can just crank out a complex system in a couple of days - repeatedly and sustainably - and who make systems that are the right shape so that later features are cheaper and easier to add, rather than becoming harder and slower. In fact at this level the multipliers go way beyond 10x.

And some of those skills build on the individual 10x dev skill set but some are orthogonal to it. Some are downright opposed.

- enough sleep, rather get in bed early than late as the quality of the sleep depends on natural rhythms

- engage with people that are affected by my work - this is important for motivation and to keep track of what actually matters

- operationalize everything, say out loud what to do next

- being honest when I have bad focus, talk about it

- trust my instinct and do the right thing, if I don't I quickly lose focus and motivation, if opinions don't align learn why

Many, many years ago a colleague wrote about the experience of being bipolar and choosing to stop taking the lithium for a temporary productivity boost and subsequent crash.

Having been unmediated and undiagnosed for most of my life, mania is a hell of a drug. But the cost is high... really high.

> The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly.

Over such short time scales, maybe, but the idea that someone could contribute in 1 year what another programmer wouldn't accomplish in 10 years is highly plausible, to me.

Someone who can sit down and start coding in an ambiguous environment, period, can easily make 10x more value themselves, and allow others to go from .1x to 1-5x merely by being able to pick somewhere to start and just doing it, which allows everyone else to break their own ‘freeze’ and start engaging as now there is something concrete that breaks the locked up state they were in.

I’ve done it a few times, and seen others do it to. It’s magic going from ‘everyone rehashing things on a whiteboard for the 10th time’ to ‘everyone working on the next iteration’

I've noticed myself that I can happily write detailed comments on HN or StackOverflow but have no inclination for blog posts, for that kind of self-content-marketing that seems to be popular these days.

I once worked on a project where exactly that happened, and I view it as one of my biggest failures of my career. I often wonder why I didn't just sit down one day and type int main( ... and just get on with it.

In the end the project got canned and both contractors terminated early, so I made sure that never happened again.

Once I had to tweak a 7000 line signal generator (ie spits out wav files) written in Java. It had a mind boggling structure, and I'm sure whoever wrote it was a mad genius of some kind.

I rewrote it in less than 100 lines of Python, where each signal primitive was basically a few lines of code max, which you can functionally combine.

Since this new program was not even 100 lines long, we were able to do a LOT more with it, and in a super flexible manner.

It's one of my happiest accomplishments.

Even worse than super-subjective, it seems like people don't agree on the definition of "10x programmer".

Is that 10x value (code * code quality) produced per unit of work-time? Per brain cycle? Are you controlling for programmer experience, or domain knowledge, as [1] pointed out? Do you actually mean 10x, or is that a stand-in for "significantly more productive" with an unknown value? Do you include collaborative skills and working with a team, or even entirely base your definition off of that?

I'm both curious as to the exact definition you have in mind, and also trying to point out the more general issue so that others arguing past each other can realize that they have two different ideas in mind.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797923

I don't find that unreasonable at all, most teams are very unproductive. So what I'd call it is "A 10x developer is a developer who can outperform a typical team of 10 developers".

I see it as more of a compliment. Nobody should be seriously and unironically calling themselves a 10x programmer, it should be bestowed by other people.

IMO that attitude never makes sense - it can make sense to avoid certain mistakes at all costs (self-driving car), but it never makes sense to try to avoid blame for them (company refuses to admit their car isn't good enough).

This is a problem of culture, not individuals.

Does the culture at a company openly admit mistakes, try to learn from them, and put systemic fixes in place to address them, or do they punish people for mistakes?

If the latter, you end up with nobody admitting to mistakes and a terrible culture, it's not about the people, it's about the situation you have put them in and the incentives given to them.

Eh? As you say, it's a culture thing, and the culture of a lot of humans is that the mistake only matters if you take blame for it. Plenty of people and organisations put more effort into avoiding blame for things than the thing itself.

Blame-free culture is great, but it has to be actively maintained.

Blame is pointless (particularly directed at humans), learning from mistakes is invaluable. What I'm saying is it is a terrible mistake to put more effort into avoiding blame than avoiding mistakes.

Blame-free culture is great, but it has to be actively maintained.

I agree.

I'm living this at the moment and it's driving me crazy.