The fact is, that for many young people, programming has been “realtor boom” for many years. I’ve been actively involved with my faith’s various youth group offerings over the years, and I have watched a lot of young people I have known grow up and head down various paths, only to pivot from all kinds of career aspirations to software development. They connect with me because I’m an old timer in the same industry as them now. But very few of them “get into it” the way I have for my career. It’s a well paying job that has relatively low entry cost (either degreed or boot camped) and allows them to support their youthful adventures or aspirations to start families.
I had an intern last cycle that just consumed this stuff. It was like I was talking to a younger me. She knew things about the company I worked at I did not know.
Anytime I was explaining anything about how to solve problems or how something should work, she would just listen and ask good questions. Next thing you knew she was using whatever we just talked about.
In my experience, the “10x” developers are just doing their job.
Maybe we should focus on the dev/10 people, they just make people who are gitting stuff done look amazing.
The reality is a subset of engineers are just better, quicker and faster. They known things and can do things faster.
I have worked a verity of teams. However gross it is to you the person pulling in 30k of line of code in a complex system in 3 weeks is definitely something more than the average developer.
I know I know. Everybody is going now pile on with some crazy assumptions about code quality shit. Let me stop you. You were not there, the code was amazing and the code ran rock solid.
Also this was not a one off. Every project I worked with this person simply was the same way. 15 min sync, 3 days later amazing features, 90%+ unit test coverage, all while doing 9-5 and cooking dinner for her family after destroying that PR button.
So whatever you want to call them, they exist, and they are likely better than you in every metric you can measure.
Get over it do better.