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Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

That's a really good point. It's worth remembering that the person picking the low hanging fruit will often fill up the baskets faster than the person who climbs up to the tall branches, But since anyone can pick the low hanging fruit, you may need to send your most talented people into lower-yield environments, since they're the only ones who can do it.

Productivity really is difficult to measure, especially in software development.

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It's not low/high hanging apples. It's apples and oranges. 1X programmer does job that is immeadiately visible and has value. 10X programmer writes code that has potential value, which is to be seen in the future, probably when some other 1X programmer implements his code. I now remembered a quote Anthony Hopkins said on 'Inside the actor studio' which he learnt while having a role as a butler: When you're in the room it has to be more empty. Same goes to great programmer and software system as is mentioned in the article.

Oh yes, completely agree. I was making a minor point about productivity, but this isn't the biggest issue at all in software development.

The biggest productivity difference between two programmers isn't that one of them produces more of the same thing as the other. Or that one of them produces more of a better thing that the other. Or even that one of them produces a more of a better, different thing than the other. It's that one of them actually grasps the thing that should to be done and does it. And it can take a long time to even realize or understand what it is the programmer is doing (often, the programmer doesn't fully understand it at first either).

My biggest problem with the 10x productivity claims is that it ignores the most relevant difference. The best programmers don't do the same things faster, they do completely different things.

> My biggest problem with the 10x productivity claims is that it ignores the most relevant difference. The best programmers don't do the same things faster, they do completely different things.

I thought the 10x productivity claim was originally from a study of comp sci students working on some algorithm (maybe compression algorithm) homework. In which case the "I think I've seen this before" example from the article probably factors in most.

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