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Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

The 10x programmer doesn't exist. Yes, an experienced programmer can complete a well defined coding exercise, in their field of expertise, ten or more times faster than other programmers. There is research to back up this claim.

However, in the real world software engineering is hardly ever just about programming. As a permanent employee there is a lot of time sink in attending meetings, town halls, compliance training, performance reviews and just generally sucking up to management to ensure you get the promotion you want.

"Ten times programmers" often heavily rely on their team to be able to be this efficient. The worst ones rely on their team to fix their hacky codebase as they move on to a new project.

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This is opposite in every way from my experiences above, including my direct experience being one. Especially the “rely on the team” - I think you’re confusing hero programmers with 10x programmers. Hero programmers leave husks of teams and shoddy code in their wake as they rampage through a career of self interest. A 10x programmer is a force multiplier for the team and spends their energy unblocking the team and driving a high standard for quality and ease of improvement. That’s essentially how they accomplish 10x the work, even in their own work. Because the team functions well around them friction to effective productivity is much lower.

That's just not true!

There are 10x programmers, and even higher. On certain tasks you won't see the difference at all. Are you John Carmack-good? I'm not. Let's be big enough to admit it!

Think of it like Opera. The average singer can't hit the high notes, and no matter how much time they are given, they may never. If you just need to sing happy birthday everyday, the average and amazing singers might seem equivalent. They're not, though.

There only a few John Carmack and Linus Torvalds in the world, just as there only a limited number of opera singers compared to regular singers. The suggestion is that 10 times programmers are much more common than that. This is a more modern scientific article dispelling the myth of a 10 times developer

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8804291

nope, sorry they absolutely exist and 10x may easily be an understatement. now, the conditions must be right - you put a 10x embedded system software engineer into a java microservices job, in a couple weeks he might be a 2x. You make a 10x engineer go to 37 hours of meetings a week, you get a 0.05x engineer (along with everyone else on the team).

but no, either you've never seen or experienced one or else you don't recognize what you just saw. people who are oblivious to their own capabilities, or lack thereof, wouldn't recognize the difference.

So that means one engineer can do the job of ten? Unlikely. It is even more unlikely that person is working in your organisation, unless you work in one of the FANG companies.

It is also worth reading this

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8804291

No, they are 10x as productive due to a confluence of abilities. But they typically achieve that by being a force multiplier and unblocking the team in various ways rapidly.

You seem to think engineers in a FAANG somehow don’t actually exist or something. Yes FAANG and other top tech employers employ a disproportionate amount of 10x engineers because (a) they recognize their existence and seek them, (b) they give them interesting work and autonomy, (c) they pay them enough no one else can poach them. They are already rare - I don’t know why, as someone who has been recognized as one throughout my career despite my own impostor syndrome I can’t identify anything special about myself, or give advice on how to be a better engineer more than the average advice. As a hiring manager i am self aware enough to identify 10x engineers and they tend like working for me. I have noticed it’s a waste to have more than 1 per team, so I try to spread mine around. But I will literally pay any price to hire and retain them because they often make a project possible that is otherwise unlikely to succeed, and they lift everyone around them and improve them through out their career.

I hope you get a chance to work with one. Or maybe you are one and like me couldn’t see it?

there are problems that people solve that you could pick 10,000 average engineers and they'd never solve. if you have the right person and the right problems why not?

how many books have you written vs. Donald Knuth? Richard Stevens? etc. those are just famous examples. do you think you have approximately the same skill as yo-yo ma? is he not approximately 100x (or more) what you'd be at his job? i don't think it's a stretch to say he's about 10x of the average professional cellist.

as other have pointed out talent, productivity, whatever measure you pick generally follows a normal-like distribution. if you center that bon "1x", most people are about average. 10x, 20x exists, but it might be quite rare. -1x also exists, as do -10x (e.g. that guy who single-handedly destroyed the project via mismanagement, ego, incompetence).

to not recognize this is just simply naive or you can't appreciate other people's talents.

There are indeed a few legends, however, they are rare. It would be rare for a developer to have the privilege to work with these people.

I agree there is a normal distribution, however, I disagree about the width of the distribution. The variance is much smaller than you think

For every legend there are many many that don’t accumulate fame enough to be observed. The legends as you say exist, therefore the distribution width is at least as wide as they force it to be. The variance is small, but the distribution is wide.

In my experience at places like AWS and other FAANG my observation is it’s at a rate of about 1:300 engineers. In other top employers it’s closer to 1:500. In startups it’s probably in the 1:800 range. In your average tech company probably around 1:1000, and in hideous soul crushing companies literally zero.

Indeed.

And often even when you look at the legends, there is a large chance they would not succeed in a standard office. For instance Wozniak begged HP to put him on the computer team, they wouldn't do it. Despite the fact that in his off time he was achieving more than the team they had assembled.

Carmack dropped out of college. He would be ignored by HR today. We know what he is capable of - he's a legend. And yet in his Meta keynotes he continually talks about working on a problem one day a week and by the next week the environment that he left it was worse than before he improved it. Quest was getting worse faster than he could fix it.

How many 10x developers are put in 0.1x environments and just look normal?

we don't really know the width of the distribution of course! and it depends on where you are and what you are doing.

"rare" i agree with. that's a far cry from being a myth or not existing. "The 10x programmer doesn't exist", i think is what you said - don't move the goal posts.

they are clearly somewhat rare, how rare is a pointless argument. but they exist and i'm glad you have acquiesced to that fact. i hope you have the privilege of working with one someday.

>The 10x programmer doesn't exist.

>I agree there is a normal distribution

Pick a lane.

Literally the third sentence says

> Their skill isn’t in programming, it’s in reducing ambiguity rapidly and advancing efforts through complexity rapidly

You should make a top-level comment if you plan on ignoring context.

How do you reduce ambiguity quickly if the customers do not know themselves what they want?

Well, that’s the trick isn’t it? A 10x engineer does that. Because you may not doesn’t mean no one can. A large part of my successful career has been built around my ability to intuitively discern the essence of the challenges my customers face and proposing then implementing novel solutions to it. I don’t know how I do it, but I do. I’m able to enlist my teams to a productive and useful way, cut through blocking issues rapidly, and (when I was writing a lot of code) implementing clean solutions that the rest of my team were struggling with. The 10x doesn’t come from writing 10x the LOC, it comes from writing the right 1 line of code 10x faster than another engineer, and finding ways to make your team around you 10x more productive. I’m sorry you’ve not had a chance to work with folks like this. And you are right, they are in top employers because they are valuable, and are over represented in FAANG. And they are extraordinarily rare, and as such are extraordinarily expensive. But rarity doesn’t imply impossibility.

Asking questions and offering mvps and doing binary search on the space of solutions.

If you are free to decide how you work you can get a lot of things done.

> However, in the real world software engineering is hardly ever just about programming.

Which is why i like to talk about 10x engineers rather than just focusing on the development part.

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