I'll argue those people need a reality check based on how things work in every other profession.

My dentist is a great dentist but she works 8am-3pm and most decidedly does not spend an additional 8 hours slogging through leettooth exercises on topics barely realated to the practice of dentistry.

My friend is a respected surgeon, but when he clocks out of the hospital he goes cycling and to the beach.

Same goes for pretty much every professional career outside of software development. Many of those have continuous education requirements, but they are done as part of the job. For example my dentist is out several weeks a year on that, not available for appointments.

So I agree with the above list, but there's nothing to apologize for in it. Working 9-5 and then completely disconnecting is the mark of a professional.

But to become a surgeon, he probably had to put in ridiculous hours for years as a med student and then resident.

Going through that gauntlet is what earned him the reasonable hours and good pay, by reducing his competition.

Similarly the people doing leetcode are doing it to stand above the competition and make big bucks in silicon valley. The people working reasonable hours in Spain are making much less extravagant salaries.

Basically the general rule is if you desire above average money, you have to put in above average effort at some point in your career.

If you want to put in average effort, you have to be happy with average salary. Which is fine for many people.

But you won't get FAANG/surgeon pay if you never put in above average effort.

My (probably cynical) take is that most SV devs are also 1x. You make the big bucks not just by being a 10x dev, but by some combination of going to the right schools, making the right connections, learning how to negotiate and when to look for new jobs, learning to jump through the big tech interview hoops etc. So yeah, you have to put in above average effort, but maybe not directly into improving your craft.

Not at all cynical and why not? That's basically my impression and I've been hiring people here for 30+ years.

A team needs a mix of people with differing skills and interests. Even notice how "all star" games are so boring? no sabermetics used in picking those people. And in any company, 90+% of the effort is routine stuff, especially once you've launched.

This applies to non-programmers too.

I worked at a FAANG and I'd agree with that: the people there were good. But there was a huge caveat: most of them were definitely doing what would be "1x work" in a non-FAANG jobs. FAANG is very good at hiring but not too good at using the people to their full potential.

How many Software Engineers do you who drive Ferraris? Probably not many, but for Surgeons, Sales People (at good companies) it's not a big deal.

No other industry would anyone tolerate being told to study 4-8 hours a day for months for a chance to pass an interview.

I realize I'm ranting but I've a Software Engineer with over 20 years experience and I've kind of lost interest being in an industry where the only thing that matters for an interview is how good I can cram leetcode, rather than what I've designed and built. Granted it would be hard for me to easily find something that pays more so I'm not quitting my day job (and now extra night job).

I was supposed to quickly recreate the quick-select algorithm from memory in 10 min. Stuff like this I learned a long time ago but have no need to memorize how to code it by hand quickly.

Brushing up for the weekend is not enough if you haven't touched the stuff in 20 years. When I've spoken with recruiters they recommend studying many hours per day ever day for at least 2 months.

No doctor, lawyer, real estate agent (and many other much higher paying professions) would ever tolerate this type of interview.

Personally the interview prep is so boarding I can't wait for the day to be done with this field (not actually software development) just having to do it for work.

Hah. The grass is always greener on the other side I guess.

- The doctor has to pass exams to get their license to practice. And additional exams to be able to practice in a specialty. It often takes YEARS before a doctor passes the requisite exams to be able to practice in their chosen specialty.

- The lawyer situation is somewhat worse. It is significantly challenging to get a job after you get a law degree (which usually is rather expensive and at any rate an additional expense after your first degree), presuming you pass the bar exam. Let's say you did better than average, you'll probably end up becoming a lawyer in a small firm with <100k salary. The big money is in New York city firms (the equivalent of "FAANG" in the legal sector) which is super competitive, and they plainly won't consider any job application from "qualified lawyers" who worked in lesser firms for a couple years.

The FAANG situation is simply a result of lack of gatekeeping in the software industry (you don't even need a CS degree) and general inclusiveness compared with the other professional industries. You don't need have a piece of paper proving you can code -- and that means sometimes candidates really literally can't code.

If the software industry operated like the medical profession, you'd have to pass a leetcode test before you are allowed to use a C++ compiler without supervision. And you'll have to take tests every 5 years to prove that you still know how to write quicksort.

If the software industry operated like the legal profession, FAANG companies would refuse to consider applications unless you had a perfect GPA from the top 20 CS programs or from another FAANG company. And then you'd have the privilege to work 60 hour weeks with them.

If the software industry operated like real estate, you'd get a low base salary and most of your money would be made on how many users your features contributed to revenue for your employer.

Nobody says you _need_ to work for FAANG. Most people don't. Given the competitive situation, obviously some people think the increased chance of getting an offer is worth the time invested in grinding leetcode problems. If you think the grass is really greener on the other side, try studying a law degree and getting a job in a New York city firm and then tell me it's really a better experience.

Disclaimer: I have a law degree (not in USA) and work for a FAANG. When I have choice over interview questions I don't ask leetcode style questions.

Slight nitpick, but this is the mark of a person with a vocation. A "professional" answers to a higher ethical calling. The name derives from "professing" an oath; for example, for a doctor to "do no harm" or an engineer to work in the public good. This can occur within a 9-5 window, but I would expect that, if needed, a professional would put their oath above clock hours if it was in conflict.

Maybe our etymology is what sets us up for work-life imbalance :)

Clergy was the first example where the term derived so I don't know if the roots of the word align with your definition. Granted, colloquial usage changes word meanings over time.

Unfortunately, at least in my recent London experience, those people tend to be the ones having the yay/nay in hiring decisions.

I agree that, if anything, it's people like me who are weirdly obsessive about their jobs to be the odd ones out.

I have a couple drifts about that, though:

- I spend 40+ hours a week in front of a terminal. That is a lot of time. Trying to do a good job and finding interest in what I do is at least in part a self-defense mechanism: if I'm invested in what I do, I'm more likely to be happy at work and have positive relations with coworkers.

- It mustn't become a way to fend off productive change. Refusing new good practices "because we don't want to learn" or "because it's good enough as it is" is incredibly stupid and self-destructive. Unfortunately, there's overlap between "it's just a job" and "different = bad" attitudes.

It's certainly okay if one is just in for the money, it's none of my business to investigate people's motivations. But if you want to do this job for the rest of your life, 35 years times 48 weeks a year times 40 hours a week is a lot of time, so it's not an attitude I'd necessarily encourage.

This. Gamification, but for real prizes.

Italians work way more than Northern Europeans, but their salaries are significantly lower because of low productivity. This is true for any occupation, including software development.

One example that comes to mind is that in the UK I get a new laptop every other year and whatever software licence or training I may need. My brother in Italy was given a 5 year old laptop that would crash every other hour and his budget for software and training was 0. The result is that he used to work twice as hard as me, while being half productive.

EDIT: if you want data, compare the GDP for hour worked in Italy with Germany or the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_...

> Labor productivity is the gross domestic product generated per hour of working time.

I have some DnD-related campaign ideas that won’t work in DnD, so I’m trying my hand at making them a pixelart game. Definitely a hobby and creative outlet!

OTOH, I’m also trying to write a database implementation in modern C++. While fun, it also mostly serves as a “look me smart” for future job applications because I’d love for my job to be a bit more in depth.

I think it’s important to acknowledge the differences!

> > * Prefers to spend time with their family or hobbies (e.g. train for that marathon) rather than working on a side project in Github.

Ha! I've encountered people whose lives revolved around running. They often fly to marathons on weekends. They'd spend mornings or evenings getting treatments from physical therapists, or cross-training with personal trainers. They spent lots of money and were in pain a lot of the time.

Nobody was forcing them to do this. They weren't ever going to run fast enough to become rich or famous. They did want to beat their previous times and/or run more marathons than last year. They enjoyed a sense of community with fellow runners.

Should these people receive corresponding advice about 1x marathoning? Maybe...

The 10x dominates the tools ( and techniques and people and capital) that multiply her.

If you have a car you can easily and consistently go 10x faster that walking pace. The same applies for your job.

Working on a given company, with access to capital and people and tools can multiply you.

- Person A gets assigned a bug, that there is a memory leak in the library, they are familiar with the code, they open up the profiler, see that there's an excess of Object X, they look for all the allocations, and see that it's not freed in one of 3 places. Whereas Person B does not really have a really good grasp on how either a library or the profiling tools work and mulls around, perhaps has to ask for help, and takes a lot more time.

- A is confronted with an algorithmic challenge, they figure out an elegant solution in 1 hour, they think it through really well, the solution is flawless the first time. B takes more time, say 2x, and still are not sure in the solution. They implement it nevertheless, and pass it onto QA, who finds bugs, and the issue needs to be reconstructed, the code rewritten and retested. These things compound and add up.

- Writing tools instead of doing things manually as others have pointed out

- Using a library meant to solve a problem instead of rolling your own

All these things are based on concrete experiences that happened to people around me.

10x is systems for the system, including good judgment

The difference isn't in quantity, but imo rather in mentality. Relentlessly automating repeatable tasks can net 100x or 2x or 0.5x depending on context, but something that don't happen often enough.

A negative number. A 0.1x programmer gets work done acceptably but is slow.

A negative programmer on the other hand creates more work for other people to fix, and you’d be better off not having them touch the code at all.

I believe this is incorrect. The baseline (or 1x) is the lowest-performing member of the team. At least that's how I learned the term.

I’ve always internalized as a “typical, competent programmer” rather than team-specific anything (Peopleware’s definition notwithstanding).

With some gentle pushback on requirements they can help clarify what the real issue is. Of course, this has to be done carefully or it will quickly get very annoying.

Another useful skill is to have a feeling for when problems get too hard and it's time to backtrack. At least in my work, most of it is basic CRUD of different varieties. If I find myself inventing new things or not finding any answers Googling my problem, it's likely that I'm on the wrong track and there is a simpler path I missed.

Libraries instead of cutting your own code for everything.

Effective searching for projects who have already done the thing you’re about to do.

Sometimes: it’s as simple as taking a day or few days to think the problem through to ensure you really understand it.

Finding a way to deliver the needed functionality in Excel/Sheets instead of a custom application.

All the biggest and most important productivity and outcome enhancing things I've done at work have been done without management knowledge or approval.

I also disagree that continuously improving is unnecessary. It absolutely should IMO. But it should happen between 9-to-5, in the workplace.

In jobs where people have quotas it is very visible, seeing people scrambling to finish it all by the end of the month, to the detriment of their free time. But this is also the "secret" of some over-achievers.

It's absolutely unhealthy.

However, I believe strongly that you can only have a happy life if you love what you do in your day job too. 9-to-5 are too many hours to be miserable and wait for end of your work day[*]. Also you spend a lot of time with your colleagues. Life is short, don't waste that time.

I'm German, by the way, and I'm not sure how well my attitude fits the cliche;-)

[*] Don't you have a nicer word for the end of your work day in English? In German it is called "Feierabend", where "Feier" comes from fire but means celebration and "abend" is evening. So we have a party evening every day. What an apt word.*

This is bad news for the huge amount of people with jobs like trash collector or grocery bagger.

I've met many people doing the kind of jobs you describe who find it satisfying. They may love using their hands, making the world a little cleaner, helping others, or just like their coworkers. Some say they like the simplicity of a job where it's easy to tell when you did it well and you never need to take your work home with you. Some find it ennobling because of what they pay lets them do.

At the same time, I've met just as many people in theoretically "good" jobs like well-paying software engineering that are utterly miserable.

It's not the job, it's what the job means to you.

No one loves their job every moment of it and even the most rewarding job has challenges, stress, and drudgery.

> Strives to do a "good enough" job rather than absolute excellence.

For me, one of my biggest sources of personal satisfaction is striving for excellence. Of course I have realistic expectations, there are many pressures that may ultimately prevent me from achieving excellence, but having the goal of being the best at my craft is one of the main things that gives meaning to my work.

I spent much of the Easter weekend learning Go, and to me that was a solid investment of my time. I do not make a habit of coding extracurricularly though. If I want to hone my skills or work on a personal project, I'll do this in dead time during my fulltime work.

As an exercise, it is better to improve your ability to get things done within the 9-5 window than to allow that to balloon into your personal time.

You can still strive for excellence without running yourself fullsteam into burnoutland.

Like I said, I agreed with my parent post’s points on just working 9-5 (on average I probably work less than that), but I just think it’s important to try to do things really, really well, but within the constraints of having a balanced life.

And then let your boss fumble if they are making things up, aka arbitrary deadlines.

The team collectively ought to be questioning it. Not one individual.

Funnily enough, that was my experience working for a FAANG and a couple startups that had just recently gotten a lot of investment money. They need 300 developers, and only the best, but they're a bit disorganised and don't have enough work for all devs. Lots of sprints finished three days earlier, lots of digging holes and filling them back.

And you're 100% right that it sucks.

People adapt to their environment. I don't think there is anything ethical involved. Most people have found that their best trade off is not caring too much about their careers, a byproduct of decades of incredibly low mobility inside the job market, because of high unemployment and the legal framework. This is not longer true for software, companies are hiring like crazy, salaries are going up and people are jumping ships.

Whether a 10x programmer, a 1x programmer, a startup founder. We all have different views on what a well lived life is. Which could include being the best or prioritizing things outside work.

Work is life. I don’t want to spend a third of my life on something that’s just a “means to an end”. It is me. It is mine. It is my expression. It’s the result of everything I’ve got to give to this world.

So, to each, their own. This game is better played when you have skin in the game (equity, control, recognition).

I think framing a life as a "game", which implies that there is a specific goal upon which one can either "win" or "lose" is the core of your disagreement with that particular way of thinking. Some people see things as more of an open-ended, "freestyle" exercise, rather than a win-or-lose plan