how about the negative 1x or negative 10x developers.

you soak up tons of time of other developers' mentoring time while never "learning how to fish". you can't figure out how to solve problems so you're always stuck. you choose the wrong path of investigation and waste weeks on the wrong line. you won't post your code for review until it's "ready" so no one's ever sure really how to help you or your progress. people complain about you to managers but nothing is done. you get good reviews. you earn as much as your colleagues.

guesses problems reasons instead of try to debug

I worked with person who told his/her manager that "they [mozilla] decreased stack size in firefox[0] and that's why app doesn't work because there was a lot of recursive calls under the hood cuz they used knockout.js or something like that"

the actual reason was some null or some other trivial thing

[0] I checked that later and they even increased it in last versions.

Or, you build complex structures to perform automation, but never finish them. You spend alot of time and energy maintaining the house of cards and finishing the non-automated parts without letting others know what you're doing. You move on and the house of cards all falls down. <Been in the cleanup phase of this multiple times>

That's the Net Negative Producing Programmer

https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer

http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf

or you rewrite something that worked fine, with buggy half-backed implementation that uses some new overhyped library/language :)

That definitely exists too. But I guess they already have some chance of getting fired.

I actually think they get promoted for shipping something exceedingly complex and challenging that still barely works. It doesn't matter if a much simpler, robust solution was passed over.

There are costs to firing people (morale, hiring overhead, other risks etc) so often they are kept around for a couple years on the hope that they will somehow improve.

0.1 devs are actually fine, they don’t really exist unless they stare at YouTube for 36 hours each week. Usually when incompetent devs start to do something the result turns negative quite quickly.

The 1x and 10x can much easier change into a high paying job at another company that doesn't pay all of its developers the same. The problem with that is a lot more people think they are 10x and others 0.1x when in reality most are ~1x so that leads to a lot of surprise about how even the pay is though.

I only have experience in EU, and here I think a 10x might be able to get max 20% more. In practice, they might love the job more than the pay, and so make as much as the rest. The ones earning more money are the ones who negotiate.

Edit: Sorry my explanation wasn't complete. In my opinion, getting a 10x developer has more to do with the work environment than with the developer. Some companies or structures just don't allow you to be a 10x developer.

> in EU, and here I think a 10x might be able to get max 20% more.

More like 200% more.

There's a lot of Europeans here in the Valley, but almost no Americans in Europe. There's a reason for that. There are also "dark matter devs" in Europe that are working remotely for SV companies, at SV salaries. They simply won't ever show up for interviews at local companies.

> In my opinion, getting a 10x developer has more to do with the work environment than with the developer.

I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Next summer they tried to get him back but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. Of course, he wouldn't return. That's when they realized a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to them; they lucked out hiring him that summer but there was no chance they could attract someone like him full time.

Hahhaah - I was about to post a similar comment.

I think there's a default engineer level and then 0.1 or the -10x :) The -10x will create complexity that cannot be undone.

This said an engineer is just an engineer. The problem is many coders are not engineers.

10x is real. Those programmers are still alive. Example Jeff Dean.

Also John Carmak and ton that are not well known. The point is it's a relative measure that is overused. Is Jeff Dean 10x relative to John Carmak? :) Irrelavant? Yes. Is the 0.1x and -10x more relevant? perhaps :)

I have worked with 10x developers more than once and they were not at all like how you describe. They didn’t work harder than the rest. Quite the opposite. They were quite lazy. However what they did do was carefully avoiding making the bad mistakes everybody else around them were making all the time, focusing on simplicity and straightforward solutions. That’s all they had to do to completely outperform everybody else while probably only truly working a few hours a day. They almost never had to fix bugs because their code just worked 99.99% of the time with zero bugs. Very impressive.

Dunno, I feel the 0.1x-thing is often a function of obstacles in the way of productivity.

At my last job, I was part of a crack team of senior consultants spent months building a CRUD service that basically did nothing but passing data from incoming requests to another API, and then doing the same with the responses. Because the service was distributed, this was asynchronous, and state was persisted in a byzantine state machine. By God were all the buzzword dev-ops checkmarks green. The entire team spent most days navigating a maze of elaborate OpenAPI specs, trying to make sense of nebulous kubernetes failure states, and debugging spontaneously self-breaking Jenkins pipelines that took a full hour to run each time regardless of fail or success. Hours were spent documenting the work, multiple daily standups, updating Jiras with elaborate definitions of done, time reporting in multiple tracking systems. It could take a full week of this stuff to bring a trivial code change into production. That was at most 0.1x development. I spent a lot of time browsing the internet because I literally couldn't affect the speed of the work, I was always waiting for some process somewhere to decide to finish so I could repeat the cycle.

Note: Many of these things are necessary sometimes in larger projects. This was not a large project, but it was run as though it was, leading to a development workload that was almost entirely process overhead.

In my spare time, I developed an internet search engine, and quite literally was 100x more productive than I was in my dayjob because I had none of that bullshit in the way.

> You earn as much as your colleagues.

That's one way of running a tech company but what you'll end up with is going to look more like one of those comically bad bodyshops that's used for outsourcing. These have a turnover so high it's almost impossible to find someone with more than two years of experience. And, well, the results speak for themselves.

Truth is, the 10x will eventually leave when someone from his circle points out he has a much better comp package than him and lure him for an interview (and will, of course, cash that 10K referral bonus). But the 1x and 0.1x will sure stick around for many years.

Key callout: "You earn as much as your colleagues."

Theres no reward for being 10x at 99% of companies. If youre that good, start your own company.

I think "10X" is a goofy concept, but I have absolutely worked with developers who have dramatically more impact than their coworkers.

To a person, none of them wanted to start their own company. In my experience, they want to come to work, write great code, go home at 5pm and collect a paycheck.

With that said, there are plenty of entrepreneurs and technical co-founders who think they're 10X developers. That's how you end up with large legacy Ruby codebases (I kid, I kid)

Yeah youre correct, I'm talking money wise, you dont get paid 10x your colleagues, maybe 1.5x.

This was the post I needed to read today. Thanks.

I can be all 3 of those things at the same job. Just depends upon how I'm feeling that day.

Often, at initial stages of a project it's 10x. When the project matures, it becomes 0.1x, as majority of work is now bug fixes, technical support and office politics.

here's a secret: these things aren't constant. Everybody has been a 10x engineer for at least one day in their career. Everybody has also been a -10x engineer for at least one day in their career. Most of us spend our time sliding somewhere between the two extremes depending on our mood, how interested we are in this particular part of the project, whether we're distracted by health issues, etc.

wow. That's deep.

TLDR: Don't get stuck at "0.1x". Do leetcode and switch while you get competitive salary.

In a new company you are usually 1x for the first year. You might be a 10x for a while after the first year then some thing changes like a project move or disagreement with technical decisions/manager/raise then you become 1x and then 0.1x. This is a dangerous time. Better switch. If you don't in the next appraisal cycle you will get compensation below you skill level and then its hard to get your compensation back.