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Comment by leftyted | Hacker News Reader

Whether or not "10x programmers" exist, I can say for sure that 1/10th programmers exist. I know a few in that category. And it really amounts to the same thing.

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> Whether or not "10x programmers" exist, I can say for sure that 1/10th programmers exist.

Not in this context. The term “10x programmer” comes from an observation that there is a factor of ten variation between the best and the worst programmers. So the worst programmers in this context are 1x, and 1/10th is meaningless. People hear “10x” and assume it’s ten times the average, but that’s not the case.

More information here: https://www.construx.com/blog/productivity-variations-among-...

I think the post of the parent is a bit tongue-in-cheek; I read it mostly as “I don’t know whether there are a few developers that are significantly better than the rest, but I do know there are a few developers that are significantly worse than the rest”.

It’s effectively the same thing, but from a different perspective.

From my own experience, I can tell you that programmers can even go negative with their productivity.

I've had one employee on my team who ignored my instructions, ported a critical tool to a new execution environment, added 20 additional dependencies, and then pushed the broken mess onto GitHub. After sinking some days into trying to get anything useful out of the source code, we eventuality just deleted it.

I think the multipliers also conceal another issue. A lot of programmers have a net negative impact on your code base. They may be "productive" in the sense that they produce a lot of code, but then that code is riddled with bugs that drag down the whole team's velocity.

If you're 10x of a negative impact then you just produce bugs faster.

It doesn't take broken code to have a net negative impact. Any code at all is liability, so if you're writing code, it better be worth it. Figuring out what produces value is surprisingly hard, so I would bet the majority of code being written has a net negative impact.

And then don't get me started on marginal profit. Producing some value is a lot easier than producing marginal value that outweighs marginal costs. Now we're talking a smallish fraction of the code being written.

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