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Comment by bobloblawblah | Hacker News Reader

I do agree with the author that a 10x environment is required for a 10x programmer.

I was a 4x-5x programmer at my last position relative to my co-workers. However, I was fired after I tried to take my government legislated vacation entitlement after 3 months notice (and after the employer lost the right to dictate when I could take the vacation). The threat of firing also came with a promotion without additional pay. Bureaucracy, & labour violations in the pursuit of profit has created a <1x environment.

Mine is somewhat of an extreme case, but anyone will lose any motivation to outperform without commensurate pay/recognition.

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Yours is not an extreme case at all. In fact, this is standard fare in the industry, but nobody wants to admit it happens to them because it's embarrassing.

Europe has very strict vacation policy (mandated 5-6 weeks), healthcare benefits and employee protections (hours worked, overtime pay, etc). I wonder why that is? Western Europe isn't exactly a developing region. Maybe they realized that you can't give employers all the power and expect them to act benevolently at the expense of profit.

American work laws are dystopian. Being an employee in the USA is sheer stupidity. PG says as much during his essays. I always find the "Who's hiring" threads comically ironic on HN.

We're here not to be employees, but to become entrepreneurs.

> I always find the "Who's hiring" threads comically ironic on HN.

> We're here not to be employees, but to become entrepreneurs.

And you don't find ironic the fact that most entrepreneurs need employees (that are usually paid substantially less than the value they create, in line with all other companies).

There are lots of thing in that comment that indicate it is not a USA based employee at all. For instance, I don't know of any jurisdiction in the USA that has a vacation mandate.

So, that isn't to say that USA's work laws are good, only that European style work laws are not enough to prevent abuse.

The difference is that if Europe/Canadian workplace laws are being violated, you have recourse, which means you don't have to choose between 'whatever the employer decides to require' and 'quit my job and suddenly have no income'.

Personally I would skip any job ad that asked for "10x programmers", or ninjas or whatever else is popular right now.

Are companies not hiring 'rock stars' anymore?

All of these terms just seem designed to haul in the people with the biggest egos. You're not just a widget, working on a computer, producing results. You're on stage, with lights and speakers and a crowd cheering your name! You're world famous! Go you!

I have no interest in being a 10x rock ninja. I'm happy being a programmer, or 'engineer' if I want to feel especially fancy.

> I was a 4x-5x programmer at my last position relative to my co-workers.

Somehow I have a hard time believing anyone who judges their own skills themselves. Dunning-Kruger comes to mind. Especially when being fired after barely 3 months.

> Especially when being fired after barely 3 months.

The parent mentioned 3 months notice prior to taking holiday/vacation, not 3 months of employment.

Yeah, I'm thinking the same thing. In my experience you gotta really stink it up to get fired in this industry.

I don't think it automatically follows though that 10x environment leads to 10x programmers. I have now, in my career, come into perfectly fine organizations where hardly anything got done. A serial history of 0.2X programmers in an environment that didn't limit them.

So I completely disagree with the premise of the article. The 10X programmer exists and environment, while a factor, isn't the only factor.

That's not what he is saying. His header is: "There is no such thing as a 10X developer (without a 10X environment)." It's p->(q is possible), not p->q.

And that is not really true either. Many years ago I worked in the federal government and there were quite a few 10x developers and teams holding everything together despite the pretty poor environment and overall low quality.

I think it would be more precise to say ¬p → ¬q rather than p → (q is possible), where p = E is a 10× Environment and q = ∃ a 10× developer in E.

From the article: "Let’s first start with the mythical 10X developer: there is no such thing."

Case of "I'm going to pick the sentence I like the least out of its context and argue against that"?

It's literally the first line of that section, the topic sentence of the paragraph it's contained in, and that paragraph is a defense of that premise. Hardly cherry picking.

Ultimately though I feel like the flaw of the argument is the idea that there are all these great developers sitting around constrained by their environments. Great developers would be constantly frustrated by poor environments and would either change them or move on. What really happens is that these poor environments attract poor developers and nothing changes.

Certainly no company can go out and hire and rock star or a ninja or whatever and save their organization if the organization is terrible. It could work, and it has worked, if the organization is willing to change. But more than likely said 10x developer would just move on when they couldn't affect the change necessary to produce 10x the output.

p->(q is possible) is a tautology. It does not carry any information.

Wow. Why were you downvoted? I'm the one who made the mistake & you're of course correct.

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