Hacker News Reader

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).

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com