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Comment by hbrn | Hacker News Reader

This is probably not a common interpretation, but I've always viewed the idea of 10x developer as someone who delivers 10x the value. Not necessarily 10x lines of code or even 10x story points.

1x developer might look at the problem and think "this is an interesting and challenging problem to solve, I'll solve it in a week". He solves it in 2 weeks, and despite failing his own deadline feels really good about himself. After all he solved a problem.

10x developer might look at the same problem and think "this is an interesting and challenging problem to solve. I'm not going to solve it today because the impact is too low and cost of the solution is higher than cost of the problem".

1x developer might ship 500 lines of code per day.

10x developer deletes 50 lines of code per day, and ships a 100.

1x developer is good at solving problems.

10x developer is good at not creating problems in the first place.

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And then there are, less abstractly, developers like Jarred Sumner who develop a product by themselves and then gets $7m in funding and starts a company. Many interesting projects begin with a crew of one, sometimes produced by balancing between work hours and personal hours.

Meanwhile many competent and useful people will never achieve such output in their entire lifetime. So what magnitude do we assign to this difference? Is that 10x? 100x? Infinity? Whatever the case, it's "a lot" more and the exact measure of these metaphorical numbers are beside the point.

I disagree. Our technical woes are not caused by the teeming masses of 1x developers, locally solving small problems but creating bigger ones.

Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source: the fact that we answer to capitalists, people who hold private wealth and will do absolutely anything to retain it, even if it means covering the world in lahars of shit.

If we don’t fix that problem and overthrow the corporate system, there is literally no point in anything we do.

Capitalism might have it's downsides, but I came to think that software engineering problems are deeply rooted in human psychology.

> Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source

It's tempting to think that all the world problems are coming from a single source and therefore have a simple solution, but usually that's not the case.

Leftists will always blame capitalism. Feminists will blame toxic masculinity (most developers are men, right?). Nazis will blame Jews. Every ideology claims it solves every possible problem, but it never does.

You’re not wrong that human psychology is the ultimate source of the problem, but inventive structures and cultural circumstances decide how the good and the bad in our psychological makeup get expressed. Eradicating corporate capitalism wouldn’t come close to see living all problems—it would only move us up Maslow’s hierarchy so we could grapple with more interesting problems than the depressing ones we’ve got now.

I don’t think you can fairly compare feminism and leftism (well-intended movements) with antisemitism, which has a historical record of resulting in mass murder. And toxic masculinity certainly exists, though not all forms of masculinity are toxic, and I don’t think men ourselves are in any way “toxic”. In fact, toxic masculinity and corporate capitalism are closely intertwined, each being an expression of the other.

This discussion has already happened hundreds of times. I'll say that Mao and Stalin are leftists that killed way more than Hitler. And you'll say they aren't really leftists.

The problem with these radical solutions is that they are ultimately unscientific. There's nothing you can say to a feminist that will convince them that wars aren't caused by toxic masculinity. Nothing you can say to a leftist that will convince them that horrors of capitalism don't outweigh the benefits.

At the end it comes to this: you can practice socialism in a capitalistic society. But you can't practice capitalism in a socialistic one.

Ehhh...I'm as anticapitalist as the next guy, but I've got plenty of technical debt in my entirely-non-profit side projects, too.

True, of course, but in those projects (a) you have the power and authority to address that tech debt whenever and however you want, and (b) you’re at no risk of catastrophic income loss due to tech-debt political issues outside of your control.

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