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Comment by stocknoob | Hacker News Reader

It’s amusing that people even question the existence of 10x developers.

What fraction of devs could even complete this, let alone in merely 10x the time?

It's like questioning the existence of 10x NBA players or 10x chess players. The top super GMs are basically 10x better than most other GMs, who are themselves 10x better than most IMs. It seems strange that programming would be one of the fields that doesn't have a similar distribution of skill.

I think the actual pushback of the 10x programmer idea is that it's more often used to bully regular programmers into working longer hours, rather than actually identifying top performing programmers.

There's also the part where "developer" is more akin to "athlete" than "nba player". There's lots of different types of developer, just like there's lots of different types of athlete. A 10x NBA player will certainly not be a 10x Olympic Swimmer also, more likely .1X. Part of the problem is 10x developer gets talked about like they are going to be 10x athlete at NBA and Swimming and Golf and, and, and... that's what doesn't exist.

> What fraction of devs could even complete this

Like 25%? But that’s really only because of the influx of people doing it for money.

If you’d asked me the same thing 15 years ago I’d have said 80%.

I used to question their existence but that was before I met a couple. I think it's just that they are quite rare, so a lot of people haven't met them.

If you also don't follow specific developers online then you might not notice any. Here are a few I've seen for which 10x is probably an underestimate!

* David Tonlay and Alex Crighton - feels like they've written half the Rust ecosystem between them. * Eric Traut (Pyright author) - seriously go and check out Pyright's bug tracker. It's insane.

The fraction of devs that regularly deal with databases and parsing. There are no 10x devs. There are devs with long experience in a specific category. The 10x idea is kind of stupid in terms of companies looking for them - it just means "we want people successfully trained somewhere else".

I agree there are probably no 10x devs. This person took 7 days to (almost) complete this task (which they cherry picked for their self), suggesting the average 1x dev with experience in this domain would take 70 days.

I think it would be more reasonable to call someone a 3 -sigma dev (someone 3 standard deviations above the mean. These would exist because that's how stats work)

I've always read 10x as an order of magnitude better, not necessarily 10x faster. 3 sigma is probably better terminology though.

Isn't, say, 10 days an order of magnitude faster (better) than 100 days?

It’s just one example of being 10x better but hardly the only one or the most realistic.

But probably the least subjective, and yeah, my position is that 10x is unrealistic.

It may be the least subjective but it’s also the least technically/physically probable even if someone were a 10x developer.

The gambit is that a mediocre programmer would take 10x as long to write the same code as the hypothetical 10x dev. But that’s not what a mediocre or even average dev does: they solve the problem in an entirely different (and, for purposes of this argument, less optimal) manner in some spam of time that may or may not be longer than a qualified hacker or a theoretical 10x dev. Almost all CS problems have multiple solutions, so you’re not likely to find one where there is only one solution and it takes one guy x and the other guy 10x as long.

Fair. I get your point. My only contention is of the magnitude - imo someone 10 times better than the average developer is a unicorn. But the term gets thrown around any time someone is 'just' really good; they wrote fairly optimal code, quickly. However, to your point, there may be an argument to be made that people who have made a huge impact on the CS landscape are 10x-ers (regardless of efficiency). Is Linus a 10x-er?

It's worth pointing out that in the origin of the "10x developer" term, it's relative to the worst performing devs, not the average.

Also, you're not guaranteed to have an example 3 standard deviations above the mean. It strongly depends on your distribution and sample size.

I think the prevailing current definition is wrt. the average dev. The worst dev could be arbitrarily bad (suggesting the average dev could also be 10x).

You're right about the sufficient sample size.

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