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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Every time I doubt the myth of the 10x programmer I go look at Fabrice Bellard's site.

Just look at his 2001 winning International Obfuscated C Code Contest self-hosting C compiler: http://www0.us.ioccc.org/2001/bellard.hint

He won the year before too, with a program which found the largest known prime number.

In 2009 he wrote a program which he used to calculated Pi to the most digits ever (at that point), on a desktop PC. He broke the previous record which was set on a 640 nodes supercomputer.

(Oh yes, original author of QEMU and FFMPEG too)

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I've always been under the impression that the dismissal of the "myth of the 10x programmer" was more about its use as a general hiring filter rather than whether there exist prolific programmers (examples of whom seem readily available).

Perhaps we should split up the myths:

1) myth of the 10x programmer - true

2) "we hire 10x programmers" - look at salaries - false (even for companies like Google and Facebook, who hire -at best- 1.5x programmers)

Price's Law suggests that the square root of the number of workers in a particular domain constitute half the productivity. This means if a particular office has 100 coders, 10 of them make up half the total productivity. So the top performers are doing ~5% of the total work each, while the regular performers, on average, are doing 0.5%. So statistically every place with 100 developers has ten 10x coders whether that's Google or anywhere else.

You can't dismiss all of them as 1.5x. Recall the binary patching done by Microsoft a few days ago. That's the work of at least a 5x guy if not 10x.

Also this is pretty silly.

Fabrice Bellard is a god among programmers, his contributions to the world of software are among the best out there... QEMU, FFMPEG, LZEXE....

His hack generating DVB-T signal by driving a VGA card is among the best out there. I think it's a bit shameful his skills are not well known out there.

Yes! Fabrice is the epitome of a hacker (as you mention driving a VGA card to generate a DVB-T signal).

He is super prolific and extremely talented, but I wonder about the quality of the code as well. ffmpeg security issues comes to mind.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

U forgot LZexe

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