Getting to 10x (Results): What Any Developer Can Learn from the Best
medium.com
medium.com
The actual content of this article seems to be "we polled people who work on software, and they used positive adjectives to describe people they liked, and negative adjectives to describe people they didn't like". Then it ends with an advertisement for the author.
What any of this has to do with being objectively good at the discipline of programming, I have no idea.
There is an implicit assumption that developer skill is scalar and transitive. If Alice is better than Bob, then Alice is better than Bob at everything. If Alice is better than Bob, and Bob is better than Charlie, then Alice is better than Charlie. This may be true in a narrow niche or for a specific skill, but does not hold in general.
Then there's little to substantiate the claim that "Simply deciding to become a 10x developer will give you a huge advantage over the competition." Sounds like a slogan from the self-help section of a book store.
I think the number one prerequisite is to be in an environment where you actually can shine. You need a lot of autonomy to be a 10x developer and you also need an audience/management that recognizes good work. A lot of companies prefer average devs and predictable outcomes over excellent work.
Most companies don’t need to “hire only the best”.
I do agree with part of the article. The best way to be a 10x developer is to be a force multiplier.
I consider myself a capable architect. I can do front end (barely), back end development, database administration, devops/netops (with AWS), talk to customers, create presentations, strategize with CxOs and lead teams. I have at some point in the recent past done all of it.
When I was the dev lead, I was very much a {some multiplier} developer but only because I could mentor and guide other developers, Devops and to a lesser extent QA. My resume of things that I could honestly say “I led” or spearheaded in a short amount of time was pretty impressive.
On the other hand, I purposefully self demoted got another job at a smaller company where any given day I’m wearing one of those hats - developer, software architect, Devops or AWS infrastructure architect.
But as an individual contributor who spends at most 20% of my time mentoring, I’m nowhere near the force multiplier I use to be. Anytime I am playing the role of the “multi certified AWS Architect” to clients, or spending time talking to customers as the “software architect responsible for X”. I’m not developing. My value add over having multiple people having those roles is only the time saved on communication overhead and hopefully I don’t do too much “negative work”.