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Comment by shortsightedsid | Hacker News Reader

The original software engineering study about the performance of some programmers being higher (28 times as per the paper) was in 1968 - https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362858. After that there really haven't been any real studies to show that some programmers are an order of magnitude better than others. The reason why the original study is not longer relevant - it was done at a time when programming meant loading punch cards. I really want to see an evidence based study about the 10x progammer than something anecdotal.

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Here's something I churn out every time a 10x thread starts again; it has some references in it:

A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance.

The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work.

Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

Furthermore what does 10x mean? What is being measured? Features, quality, lines of code, dollars, bugs, time, "the mission"? If the measured things is d(dev1, dev2, ...) then there are some interplays going on. No every 10x dev can 10x every team.

Not an evidence based paper, but via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%27s_law, the occurrence of a 10x programmer may occur 1/100 from the talent pool. A 28xer would mean 1/784.

Now all this is only an extrapolation of the above power law which was originally meant to describe papers published within a time frame. And to make things more meaningful, its really hard to compare people across teams and even companies. And finally, its all relative within a company.

From other posts, it feels like people tend to overestimate other's ability. I'm sure all those anecdotes are true but the evaluation of said individual to be 10xer may be overstated without a sensible metric.

> it feels like people tend to overestimate other's ability. I'm sure all those anecdotes are true but the evaluation of said individual to be 10xer may be overstated without a sensible metric

It's incredibly hard to estimate anyone's relative abilities in knowledge fields - and this includes yourself (probably worst of all - estimating your own ability is remarkably wrong much of the time).

How much of someone else's ability came down to an "aha! moment"? How much was because of what they've done before. How much was because of what they heard someone say about the problem that no one else caught? How much was seeing three other teammate's efforts, and noticing they're reproducing work, and can cut some of their workloads? How much was because they kept everyone else excited and motivated to finish the project and do well?

Some things are easy to compare - times to run a 5K, how many biscuits you can roll in an hour, how many bricks you can carry at once. Most things aren't that simple.

Analyzing the relative ability multiplier for any given contributor can really only be done after the fact (often well after), if at all.

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