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Comment by Kaotique | Hacker News Reader

I think the 10x developers are a myth if you compare the whole output versus another developer whole output.

But it is very common that a developer can fix a problem or build something 10x or even 100 times faster than others. Simply because they know the project, the language, understand the problem already, have experienced that problem before.

I have many anecdotes where I was stuck on something for hours and a colleague solved it in 10 minutes. But I have also counter anecdotes where 2 colleagues were stuck a whole day trying to solve a problem while I was out of the office and the next day I solved it in less than 5 minutes. The multiplication factor of that is insane, but it really happened.

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I don't think it is a myth. If you look at coding challenges and live coding, there are developers who can churn out correct and well-documented C or C++ code while speed typing and without making any substantial mistakes. Not every developer can do that, no matter how experienced he or she might be with the language. I'm not one of them, but to give an example, I find some of Bisqwit's live programming on Youtube pretty impressive - and he works as a bus driver during daytime!

Yeah, but what if you shove some other language/problem in front of them? Will they still be 10x more effective than another developer? I don't think so. My point is that you can become very good in a specific area so much that you are able to outproduce the average developer by an enormous amount, but it may very well be the other way around in another area.

They’re a 10x code typer then. This is not development in a general sense, which involves working with people.

Doing coding challenges is a special skill. To be fast you need to:

- Have all the boilerplate code almost memorized. By that I mean things like parsing a simple file, opening a display, etc..

- Know the relevant techniques, and train. For example, if you are doing a coding competition, dynamic programming algorithms are a classic. If pretty pictures are your goal, fractals and raytracing are a good start. Neither is likely to be of much use for you in the real world.

What coding challenges don't require is the ability to think long term. That code is likely to be thrown away after the challenge is completed. Managing complexity is maybe the most important part of real world programming, and for technical reasons you have very little of it in coding challenges.

As for Bisqwit's videos, they are awesome, and he certainly is very talented. I actually learned a lot from him. However, all his videos are about toy projects, not building complex applications. BTW, I think this is the reason he is a bus driver. He doesn't enjoy coding in a professional setting, because it is a different kind of work.

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