I came here too say this. The man authored in the neighborhood of 100k LOC in a year, just on this. There's a living 10x dev, it's not a myth. What is ridiculous is to think someone can 10x a normal developer, it's more like the difference between the top few percent and the bottom 10-20%. Evan Wallace is a beast, no doubt.

While he is certainly an excellent developer with great productivity to boot, LOC is an obtuse metric. For example there is a package-lock.json commit which is almost 20K lines. Otherwise I totally agree.

Agree, if anything it should be the reverse, less LOC produced means more efficient developer. But that's also a shit metric, as then people start cramming in as much complexity in every line as possible.

Best would be if we could actually measure "complexity" in a objective manner.

I really wish people would stop idolising so called '10x' developers.

Anyone that is comfortable and familiar with their toolset (e.g. go, .NET, Java, C++) and has a deep understanding of a problem (and has likely solved it once already), can churn out code far, far, faster than an onlooker.

Ehhh no I don’t think it’s that simple.

I’ve found that in any tech company, while there are many people that write good code and do a great job, there are always a handful (even at a place like Apple) that truly push the industry forward and in certain directions, partly because of how they see years ahead, partly because they are supremely talented, and partly because they attract other really good talent just to work with them.

And we know many of their names. Folks like Brian Cantrill, Yehuda Katz, Fabrice Bellard, John Carmack, Bret Taylor.

They aren’t just good programmers. They’re constantly dwelling in uncharted territory.

I’m not advocating worshipping them, just stating that their talent and output is hell of a lot more than even 10x.

I understand what you're saying, but I'd still argue that they're supremely familiar with their toolchain, and have a deep understanding of the problems they're trying to solve. My comment said they've usually solved the problem at least once already, but I don't discount people solving new problems.

Perhaps that is what makes them '10x developers': a great familiarity with their toolset and a deep understanding of the problems they are solving. In this sense I don't think it's bad to idolize them, as familiarity and understanding are achievable by many people, and they could all become a '10x developer'.

The thing is that people tend to appear to think it's black magic rather than familiarity with a toolset and a deep understanding of the problem.

Baloney. I don't think it's "black magic", but as a software engineer with some deep familiarity with my tool chain I'm not going to pretend that I could ever be as productive as some of these folks. It's like when I see another post about a Fabrice Bellard project, and I think "he gets done in a year what it would take me about a career".

I don't understand this fetishization of "everyone has nearly equal ability" in the face of tons of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I don't believe everyone has the same ability. What I do believe is that performance is explainable and there's a practical upper limit to raw output.

I made a side project that I spent 1-2years building on and off and had people saying "wow I could never build that". That's bullshit. If they were of similar intelligence and put in a similar amount of time and effort I'm sure they'd be able to replicate what I did.

The luxury of being able to spend ample amounts of time on a project or idea is also massively overlooked.

That's not all it is. Some people are just better than others. No matter how hard every tries to be the best football or basketball player, only an extremely small set of people even have the chance to make it. There are physical traits they'll never have and mental fortitude to use those traits. You can't grow yourself to 7 ft tall and you never will be able to. What makes you think the brain is any different.

If you take the perspective that some people are "just better" than others, why are we idolizing these people?

Being born with high intelligence and favourable traits is not an achievement.

> If you take the perspective that some people are "just better" than others, why are we idolizing these people?

Good question. Take it up with the people wearing jersey's with Lebron James' and Aaron Rodgers' names on them.

lol, yeah. I don't idolize them. I'm just aware of my limitations.

I wish I could upvote this more, because it's proven by a couple of the other replies to my original comment.

No more than people think making it to the Olympics is "black magic".

And I really wish people would stop denying that there can be a massive difference in productivity from one individual to the next. It doesn't really matter what the theoretical limits are. What matters is the people you have and are hiring, and whether or not they are moving the needle.

Maybe we can put aside whether or not there is No True 10x Developer. But there are certainly 0.1x developers, and even -1x developers.

I totally agree with you, but I also love the context of this quote with your username ;)

Sure, like anyone can be Usain Bolt if they are familiar with their body and has a deep understanding of running.

> has a deep understanding of a problem (and has likely solved it once already), can churn out code far, far, faster

Is this a bad thing to discourage? Perhaps one way to increase your output as a developer is to narrow your focus (rather than jumping on the latest framework or build system which require constantly re-learning new solutions to the same problem)

> Is this a bad thing to discourage?

No. It's what I encourage people in my team to do all the time. In fact it's something I was also encouraged to do.

The full quote was:

"Become an expert in at least one thing in your job or preferably career, and do it while you have the time" (e.g. when you're junior and expectations are low, or not a manager).

Bingo.

Add to it being able to work in YOUR headspace and not have to bring other people in a large-ish team along with you and you can get stuff done.

Agreed. I think most developers find themselves more productive on their side projects than they are in the workplace because there is less overhead.

I dont think the parent is just about LOC, but the quality of those LOC.

There are people producing JS bundler and are comfortable and familiar with their toolset along with deep understanding of the problem. And they dont even come close to what is being described here.

Being proficient in your tech stack helps your output sure but it's only one part (and a small one IMO) of the equation for creating something like esbuild. The author of esbuild surely has a strong knowledge of computer architecture, data structure and algorithms, operating systems and some math.

10xer is not about churning out code.

"Why is DJ Bernstein so great? I too can churn out CRUD apps very fast in ruby rails" - some webshit says this every day on HN.

That's a bit of a strawman. My full comment is that being familiar with your language of choice, and having a deep understanding of a problem means that can produce a solution faster than someone that doesn't. I used the phrase 'churn out', I could have simply said 'produce'.

I've worked in the industry for almost 30 years, and I've worked with a lot of people in that time. Those that you might qualify as '10x', all have had both of the qualities I mention.

I would not expect any of those people to switch languages and fields and still be a '10x' developer.

I would. Languages aren’t as important as you would think. Certain people can pick up the new idioms quickly and run with it.

Look at someone like Yehuda Katz. Substantial contributions in ruby (merb, bundler), JS (jQuery core team, created Ember.js), and rust (created cargo).

But trying to elevate him or make him uncomfortable (he’s also a really humble dude), but just saying there are examples of polyglots that make substantial contributions.

But isn’t what you said a bit of a straw man too? Back in the music comparison, no one would expect an excellent guitarist to take up playing piano and still be a virtuoso.

And yet… we do recognize that some people are impressively better than others at playing piano, running yards, fighting, and all sorts of other narrowly specific tasks.

It’s just that the more creative the task, the harder it to measure how much better someone is.

Calling people "webshits" is not really in the spirit of HN imo.

Amazing. That means he does his job right! As a good CTO you shouldn't have anything to do. If you're caught up in work, you're doing it wrong.

> As a good CTO you shouldn't have anything to do.

Is this for real? I mean, yeah, I don't think a CTO should be debugging build scripts, but hiring a great team, mentoring, aligning teams with a common technical vision, meeting with other company leaders to ensure the technical direction meets the needs of the business is an immense amount of work.

and he's building tools to optimize his teams.

I don't understand this perspective. Everyone only has so many hours in a day, and there's only so fast you can work.

If he's writing esbuild that is taking time away from being the CTO of Figma. Either he's working a shit ton, one of the things (Esbuild or Figma) is being somewhat neglected, or his output is actually not as high as it looks.

As someone that ran a company while working on side open source projects, don't underestimate the therapeutic value of writing code. (As a CEO, my job had almost no coding, and working on my opensource projects made me happy, and restored a lot of my energy.)

CTO and lead developer on a focused project are very different jobs - my guess would be he relaxes from the very strategy and soft-skill heavy day job by diving into a challenging problem that keeps his dev chops up and lets him focus on a finite problem.

So working a shit ton then.

No idea on Evan Wallace's perspective but there is a possibility that it isn't seen as work. It would like be me solving sudoku or some of my friends building LEGOs or solving extremely hard jigzaw puzzles

I understand that because it's often how I feel when I'm doing programming work. However, I would still consider that time spent working.

To echo what others have said here, my role as CTO and now CEO has gone from 95% coding to about 5% these days. So some nights I code on ideas and things that have been swirling in my head, just because it’s nice to just quietly write code and solve a finite (but possibly difficult) problem without interruptions. It actually IS therapeutic.

Same

The tool is likely helping Figma pretty directly by cutting developer build times.

Maybe there's not much to do as the CTO of Figma. Throwing time into Esbuild doesn't mean he's neglecting his CTO duties.

In which case my last option would be relevant:

> or his output is actually not as high as it looks

Frankly most of us would not be able to create esbuild even with all the time in the world.

Sounds like he solved his own problem?

Surprise, I didn’t know who was the maintainer and was still unheard of back then until I shared on HN and it was a like wildfire.