The 10x developer is a myth | Hacker News Reader

The 10x developer is a myth

codementor.io

12 pointsweitingliu3 comments

What a bunch of garbage. The article pivots from stating that the 10x developer doesn't exist to then implicitly accepting that they do exist and why you should avoid hiring them! That'd be like a rock band saying "nah, we don't need Eddie Van Halen for our guitarist. Joe here who just finished guitar boot camp is good enough." Yeah, right. That's not to say that rock star developers aren't often prima donnas and toxic to your culture - thus negating all their supposed advantages. That's true. It's also true that a lot of rock star developers don't come with this toxicity. But to use that to claim that the 10x developer doesn't exist is being dishonest.

He's not saying that it doesn't exist, he's saying he doesn't believe that's who startups should hire.

He's making the argument that 10x isn't solely about the person and their technical abilities. You could have a "10x developer" who joins a team and performs poorly because they're not motivated by what the company is building, or they have a shitty boss. What makes the person a good performer is the environment they're put in combined with their technical abilities.

He is though, right up in the title. And then he changes the subject to discussing why he prefers hiring inexperienced developers; which is fine, I guess, as long as shitty software is your goal. That being said, the rock-star/code-ninja culture isn't really helping anyone. I once got hired for one of those positions, but failed to realize in time what a shitty pool of wishful thinking I was diving into. From my experience, it's not the magic it's presented as, it's not about solving 10x as many problems in the same time; rather about skipping 10x as many problems and doing exactly what needs to be done, because intuition and pattern matching is much more effective than logic reasoning for heuristics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com