Comment by geoduck14 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geoduck14 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not a 10x. Ok, I'll concede that point. I'll be average for this conversation.

I know people who can just solve problems. If it takes me all day to solve something, I'll reach out to Ken and he'll say "oh, check this setting. It is probably X". Dennis has seen so many problems, he knows how I've tried to solve them and the solutions before I've finished describing what is going on.

If these guys solve something in 48 minutes that take others 8 hours, they are 10Xers.

But they are more than being "10x productive"; they solve problems that would otherwise not be solved. They get stuff done that other people would lose patience with before it is ever solved. And the best part: it isn't even HARD for them. When those guys rock, they do it with ease, they do it for FUN.

Sometimes I am a 10x programmer. Sometimes I spend 48 minutes solving a problem others work on all day before deciding it isn't possible. My goal isn't to "be a 10x programmer", my goal is to be "10x more often today than I was yesterday".

I have been called a 10xer (aka magician/one-man-army/genius/R2D2/etc..) quite a few times in my programming career. Sometimes I have felt that to be true but most times I just feel like a 1x.

Many years ago, one junior programmer asked me "How do you do it?". And I answered - "Trust your intuition". I realized later it was a "dumb" answer - but few years later I have realized the following (this may not be true for all 10xers):

I cannot remember a lot of things. Probably these memory issues are due to an undiagnosed ADD. But to compensate the memory issue, I have from an early age picked up the skill to see patterns, asking the right questions and attempting to understand things fundamentally (as much as needed to connect the dots). It exponentially increases the learning effort - but may be that extra effort gives me the intuition to solve/narrow down certain problems quickly. On top of that, I have tried to solve difficult problems just for fun - nobody had to ask me to do that. At times it is like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I would become obsessed with solving that problem even if I had pending studies for exams next morning. All that added a plethora of experience/hours. If I find somebody solving a problem quickly when I am stuck (which in itself is a rare, because I tend seek help quite late), I typically ask questions on what they were thinking. May even dig into their mindset (to their discomfort) like a psychologist.

On the other hand, I am miserably just-average when I am not interested in certain work or do not understand its purpose.

If somebody feels like a 10x in their company, I advise them to move out to a team/company where they are back to 1x, and keep doing so until age catches up and slows them down.

Thank you very much, you described my experience perfectly and I went on researching what the "alice going down a rabbit hole" is: hyperfocus.[1] It is linked to ADHD (which can be both with or without hyperactivity, ADD being the old term for the inattentive ADHD type)[2] and for some additional info, ADHD is the most common coexisting condition to ASD (autism).[3] You might want to check that out! Thanks again for this fantastic comment, it is so relatable that I honestly could have written it myself!

[1] https://www.understood.org/articles/en/adhd-and-hyperfocus [2] https://www.verywellmind.com/add-and-attention-deficit-disor... [3] https://chadd.org/about-adhd/adhd-and-autism-spectrum-disord...

> If I find somebody solving a problem quickly when I am stuck (which in itself is a rare, because I tend seek help quite late), I typically ask questions on what they were thinking. May even dig into their mindset (to their discomfort) like a psychologist.

As someone new on a big codebase, with lots of collegues with lots of experience, this part is really important. I try to not ask questions too early, but when I do, I make sure to try to dig a bit deeper. I ask other questions, about how it relates to other things I've learned. All of that help me build my understanding of the codebase, of the business, of the company and the people inside it quickly.

Perhaps Ken has already had spent 80 hours on a similar problem-solving, so this is why he got a smell of your problem. For you it looks like magic, because you went no same paths.

If you would spend 80 or 800 hours on some topic you will also become an expert "the Ken".

Some people are curious and constantly learning new things. Some people don't and just do the same stuff over and over again. So the fact some people are more experienced than the others even after spending the same number of years in the industry is actually on them, it's their achievement.

I've seen a few situations where an "experienced" team of developers struggled to solve a problem for weeks and eventually an outsider, with even no prior experience with the technology stack / framework they were using, came and fixed it for them in a day. People like that definitely exist and they are not effective because they have just solved the same problem before. I think they are effective because they often learned the fundamentals (theory) properly and then they spent a lot of time in different areas. I guess there is some kind of a network effect there - if you solved problems of unrelated types A, B, C you're more likely to be able to solve a different problem D, than a person who only ever solved problems of type A.

I think of this as a "knowledge map". The more you cover the white spots on the map, by randomly probing all over the domain (i.e. years of experience), the better you can make reasonable assumptions about yet unexplored territory, connecting the dots. Monte-Carlo knowledge probing -- I cannot get all local maxima, but I have an understanding of the general topography.

> Some people are curious and constantly learning new things.

the implication seems a bit disingenuous as if the curiosity and constant learning only counts if it is towards computer science.

Why? I thought their comment was clearly in context of one’s job as a programmer.

I'm a 10x human being. I don't feel pressure to be anything from any outside person. Highly recommended to learn that and grow yourself as a human, not as a programmer.

Nothing you build today will even remain a couple of years down the line. It doesn't matter if you are 10x or not. What we do is completely meaningless anyway. :)

> Nothing you build today will even remain a couple of years down the line

Speak for yourself.

> 'just solve problem'

Exactly that. If one developer cannot solve a problem and the other does. Is that InfinityX programmer?

Depends on the value of the change. :) You can build software with people who cannot solve certain types of problems in their domain. The result just won’t be as useful or valuable. Measuring contribution to that increased value, less tech debt, can be challenging but some organizations have strong analytical abilities in that respect.

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