Do elite software developers exist?

> But as far as I can tell, being a good accountant is mostly a function of good training. I don't hear people described as a "born accountant". I don't see people arguing about whether one accountant is 10X more productive than the average.

Unless the author is an accountant or otherwise close to the field (e.g., talkative friend is an accountant), this is a weak statement. I doubt people not in tech know that people in tech write articles arguing about "born programmers" and "10X" programmers. Such talk is internal to our field.

Most people do know a lot about sports, because sports is very interesting for most people. Accounting and programming, on the other hand, are opaque and boring-sounding to most people. When the author talks about accounting, then (again, unless the author is an accountant or close to the field - I see no mention of either) that could be talk about a stereotype of the field of accounting, not actual accounting.

Just for fun, a non-stereotypical super-accountant is Lewis Litt from the TV show Suits. He's clearly a rockstar accountant in that show, capable of achieving things 100 average accountants can't. Is he a realistic character? I don't know, just like I don't know if the "all accountants are about the same" stereotype is true.

All of this doesn't necessarily undermine the entire point of the article, of course - maybe accounting is not a good example, but some other field could be.

One awful thing about these discussions is the invisible factor: team structure. (Did I miss the part where he addresses it?)

- One phenomenon: First Programmer racks up massive technical debt to spew crap out fast. (Which is a valid strategy, but has its tradeoffs.) Next programmers all have lower productivity because they're living in the First Programmer's world. (And the managerial system's set up to reject sufficiently large improvements to the situation.) Mediocre First Programmer becomes a superstar.

- Another phenomenon: Contractor who swoops in and gets the closest thing the team has to greenfield projects, while everyone else tends to pull maintenance-type tasks off the backlog. So the Contractor becomes a superstar.

- Another phenomenon: managers more likely hire someone who merely LOOKS and SOUNDS like an ideal programmer. Other programmers treat them with more respect too. (I remember a successful programmer who was fooled by an ideal-looking-and-sounding programmer, until they worked in a two-person team. Then he discovered Mr. Ideal simply parroted tech podcasts word-for-word. Just your typical big-mouthed junior programmer dudebro.)

Over time, these advantages compound. These programmers get into the right circles, tasks which level up their skills faster, etc.

Yes, they do: http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/Origins_of_...

Eric's article is a prime example of what's wrong with software development writing: lots of opinion with a few anecdotes and analogies tossed in for good measure, but absolutely no reference to any scientific study to justify any of it.

I'm not trying to pick on Eric, but it really bothers me the extent to which we listen to, discuss and ultimately adopt the unsourced opinions of our peers. How much of what we do is done simply because someone like Martin Fowler told us to? Why do we so seldom ask, Where's the evidence?

Elite programmers absolutely exist, but not because elite software developers are smarter or more brilliant than normal ones. Instead I think that the best software developers do the following

1. Ability to rapidly prototype responsibly - make good choices about which short cuts can be taken, and making sure everyone understands the implications of those shortcuts. There is some curve of doing things right and doing things fast, and the good people I've seen can walk this line appropriately given the business demands.

2. Ability to not get bogged down in writers block or analysis paralysis, which I've seen take out weeks of productivity in less experienced programmers (everyone gets this some time, regardless of experience)

3. Domain knowledge of the problem at hand - so that you know what you build will actually be useful. Everyone can be told what should be done by sales or whatever, but combining knowledge into one head rather than 2 is vastly more productive

4. Enabling the above 3 things for the rest of your team.

To answer the question at the bottom: yes, literal rockstars. More prosaically, authors fit the bill.

There's some parallel world where programming a computer is obviously considered an author's profession (we use grammar, do we not) and where the profession of software editor is well-paid and prestigious. I'd rather work in that world, to be frank.

This article is missing something more fundamental: why pay more for talent?

Sports has very lopsided rewards, just by the nature of competition. In the Olympics, the winners often beat the losers by amounts that nobody would pay extra for under normal circumstances. But since the winner gets most of glory, it's worth it to be that much better. Team sports also have a lot of situations where being slightly better means you score points and otherwise you don't. Games are set up to have binary payoffs to be more exciting.

On the other hand, someone working in a warehouse could have an amazing talent at moving boxes, but they're not going to get paid much more, because the increase in speed isn't worth that much more to the business. (That is, unless someone wants to set up a contest?)

If you want to know why businesses pay a lot for programmers, you have to start by looking at the rewards to the business. Startups have very high and difficult to predict payoffs, so people are willing to pay a lot for talent that they think might give them an edge. This will be true even if the edge isn't all that great objectively speaking.

Programming as an entire profession is too broad for a single discussion of elite performance. There are aspects of programming which are only about being competent to a sufficient degree, which is like accounting or practicing law. Other aspects of programming will take as much competence and creativity as possible and still want more, which is like athletics or creative writing or theoretical physics.

I find interesting that we usually compare so called "elite developers" with areas like sports, where an objective comparison can be established (Usain Bolt is better because he can consistently run 100m a couple of 1/100 sec faster than anyone else) [Edited for clarification, I mean their elite peers]

I'm not sure if we should also make comparison with the productivity of "elite writers" (even though there are best seller authors), "elite doctors", or "elite plumbers"

I didn't love the accountant analog. Part of the problem, aside from measurement, is impact. A great athlete can make outsized impact. And while I'm sure a horrible accountant can make an outsized negative impact, it's unclear to me if a great one can make an outsized positive impact. What would that impact even be? Programmers impact can be felt with rev speed, quality, maintainabilty, performance, etc. It's hard to measure how much one person on a team can affect those things but at least they all matter and are felt, even if difficult to measure.

I'd like to know more about elite researchers. Or surgeons. Or oncologists. Or long term value investors. Are there folk in those types of professions who have outcomes who seriously outstrip the top 10% of their peers?

Elite accountants usually get promoted into CFO positions, where they are very important and get a huge paycheck. There is a huge difference between a good and an amazing CFO.

I think 10X people exist in any area, including accounting and programming. E.g. John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Poul-Henning Kamp. Some top accountants can be found by looking at CFO positions of huge companies.

These people are very rare tho' and most of us have probably not worked with a 10X person. Just like most of us have not played football with a "Ronaldo-level" player.

The thing is, the "Michael Jordans" of software development existing isn't really all that valuable for the people looking for them.

What would start.up.ly do with John Carmack? Most of the companies that start up aren't trying to solve the kind of problems that need this fabled head down super-star coder to solve. What they really need is someone who can get the big picture of their business space, and know what to do to accelerate that business through software. The type of person they really need, and that are really valuable in software are the people that know what not to code, and how to get what needs to be done done, in a sustainable way. Startups don't need the guy who swivels his chair around, taps his fingers together, and does the magic they want. They require the guy who can stand there with them, help them figure out what they can do with what they've got, and what they need to get to do more, if they need to do more.

What they should be looking for are 10X EMPLOYEES, who have above average development chops. Then pay them appropriately. Not 10X, that's not sustainable, but value more than just the amount of code someone can write, value the overall gain someone brings to your product, and be willing to pay for it, and you'll do better than wasting time and money looking for Carmack to come help with your iOS app.

It's interesting that the article uses sports as evidence that "elites" do exist to some degree. On the other hand, I used to compete frequently and talked with many professional athletes. Even among that top 1% of athletes, the ones who were the very best (world champions or olympic medalists) usually said that talent is overrated and it's mostly about hard work.

That's not to say that I think everyone is born on equal ground. I just think talent should be thought of as having that work ethic and drive as opposed to some innate ability. For whatever reason, some people will just naturally work harder at something, especially when that person likes what they are doing.

I've seen this in the work place as well; the people who are interested in what they are doing usually outperform those who are uninterested, even when those who are uninterested may be less intelligent. However, as the people who are more interested continue to work hard, (I like to think) their intelligence will also develop because they are pushing themselves.

If elite software developers don't exist, then elite writers don't exist. But I don't think anyone would make that argument.

The author mentions Michael Jordan (and LeBron James) but fails to mention how rare "Jordans" are (the buildup highlights the skill differences, not the scarcity).

Truly elite software developers are as rare as Jordans, i.e. one every 20 years or so. John Carmack would probably fall into the elite category, Dennis Ritchie was probably his generation's "Jordan" - but if you're defining elite in Jordan/LeBron terms we wouldn't expect to see many elite developers.

Elite software developers definitely exist especially when you measure the magnitude of contributions made to the industry and how influential the contribution was. I would definitely place a guy like John Carmack in the elite class considering his contributions to many notable video games over the years. This type of measure is not all that different than sports where an athlete's greatness is measured through the number of championships won and individual stats and records. I would definitely argue that the difference in talent between a competent/average individual in software probably isn't as big as in sports. If you quantify how "elite" an individual is in software by their influential contributions to the industry versus championships won and records set in sports, you're definitely more likely to achieve "elite" status in software. Take Ruby on Rails as an example, DHH is a hell of a programmer considering he's built a multi-million dollar business in Basecamp and how popular and influential Rails has been to web development. Now consider the confluence of factors that allowed Rails to get huge. Things such as design, code quality, timing, marketing, luck, etc. all played roles to differing degrees. If you compared this to something like being an elite basketball player there are even more factors out of your control. Being elite in basketball is pretty much impossible. If you're 6ft and 180 pounds there is no way you can reach the level of greatness of a guy like Michael Jordan. In a sport like basketball genetics plays a huge role in establishing the base for an individual to become elite, and obviously a ton of hard work on top of those genetics too. If you don't possess the combination of height, athleticism, strength, speed, long arms, big hands, basketball intelligence, etc. there's absolutely no way you can reach Jordan or LeBron's level.

With every industry where you need some sort of specialized skill and are able to quantify influential achievements in some sort of way, there are always going to be elite individuals.

In the discussions about rockstar developers people pay far too little attention to context, to the environment in which people work. Some people have both the education and inclination to be great at developing CRUD apps. And if the job requires churning our Rails or Django code, those people will appear to be rockstars. Meanwhile a guy who really groks distributed multiprocessing doesn't have the raw material to work with to display his talent. But if the context changes, the needs of the company shift, then you will see a new rockstar emerge and people will be wondering why the old rockstar simply can't cut it any more.

Unfortunately, most jobs are in an environment where needs do change, and the majority of developers who work in such environments, do not see a real clear "rockstar" distinction among the people they work with.

To me, this suggests that hunting for a rockstar to add to your team may well be a fools errand. We should probably do more to raise up all developers in our team to a higher level, by making sure that everyone understands our set of tools, the apps that we have already created (and will have to modify in future months, years) and the upcoming new business requirements. Everyone in our business knows that we have to be constantly learning, but few development teams try to manage that learning as a team so that everybody's competence level rises. It does no good if your job requires great CRUD apps while you are learning Clojure on the side, your workmate is learning Go language, and the architect is busy learning .NET Reactive eXtensions.

If the job requires CRUD using Rails, you would likely be better off if everyone learns Python/Django because then you all have a choice of tools to use that fit the needs of the work you are doing. Or Grails on Groovy. Even node.js and Lua have some good CRUD frameworks.

In another environment, Clojure, Erlang, RabbitMQ, Celery/Python, Scala/Akka etc. will be the things you need to know.

And in another environment, even today, C/C++ with SodiumFRP would be a better thing to know.

There may not be 10X accountants, but there certainly are 1000X divider accountants.

Consider Rita Crundwell. She is, objectively speaking, 1000X worse than the typical average accountant.

http://www.wirepoints.com/how-the-largest-municipal-fraud-in...

I also have, a couple of times, worked with 1000X toxic bosses in the software industry. They usually avoid doing something so flagrantly illegal, but their projects fail and blame is deflected to other people.

From my experience, software development is much more like writing than accounting or sports. In my experience writers vary a lot in their skill. Not everyone can write, and some writers are much better than others. Of course some not very good writers still create useful documents. In my experience though writers are not fungible. No one would replace Shakespeare with a pulp hack, but that is really what a lot of this argument seems to me to be about

I wonder if we're evolving scoring systems right now. Not so much with hackathons and sites like codefights.com but through data mining github. I'm thinking of a recent post to HN in which successful github projects were correlated with a contributor who added more code than all other contributors combined. I suppose if I were looking for a 10X developer, I might reach out to people like that?

The only plausible way to understand the 10x programmer is that this person is someone who accelerates productivity 10x, by inventiveness or whatever else.

For example, the person who wrote the first parser generator was a 10x programmer. He may have written less code altogether than the first client of the parser generator but he made generations of programmers more effective.

They do exist, think of this metric, bugs per line of code. Rock star programmers write fewer lines of code, but higher quality lines of code, and therefore have an exponential quality effect on the code base.

Then think of how they help/influence others, that is the real 10x multiplier.

I wonder why we talk about 10x or elite or rock star programmers in the first place.

Do we ourselves want to be 10x developers?

Or do we want to hire 10x developers?

Or do we want to work with 10x developers?

Or do we want to figure out if we can measure software development in the first place?

There is a fait détail you sud not point out : in sports or accounting, the art is stable. Wereas in software programming the langage is nit stable at all ... ans it changes vert much the évidence of a stable-élite programmer.

If you can't measure programming ability then superstars won't get superstar salaries, unlike sports.

A couple things:

First to the authors question regarding a similar profession - It would seem to me that actual musicians and performers would fall into this category. I haven't seen any definitive measure for identifying an actual Rockstar, or a Rockstar Actor (to use the same vernacular), or Comedian. I don't think salary alone would identify this type of person, since its highly a highly subjective area that are influenced by personal tastes.

I think software shares this as well. What makes a good piece of software? Moreover, what makes a good software developer? Is it ingenuity and intellect? Or is it somebody who is content with the more mundane aspects of a software project, isn't going to write a new Graph API, but consistently and methodically develops clean and working code? In a theoretical scenario - lets say a single guy was responsible for all of the Bash scripting that went into the Init system millions of servers use today. There's nothing cutting edge in those things, its a lot of "start this, then this, and if this happens call this" type of linear design. Would he qualify as a "Rockstar" based on the fact that millions of people rely on his scripts to start machines up? Is he worth more to a potential employer than, say, John Carmack if your developing/supporting a Software as a Service platform?

I've been seeing a lot of articles exploring the Rockstar complex in the past year or so, which makes me think its more or less an invention of marketing than an underlying trend in the industry. Its basically asking "Are there software developers who are insanely good at writing code to solve problems?" The answer is yes - I dont think it merits scientific inquiry.

But there's a more interesting question for me that nobody seems to address; Why the sudden fascination (demand?) for "Rockstars" in development? In my personal experience it seems to be because of a (false) perception that people who write good code are hard to find. And even when you have somebody writing good code, because of the abstract nature of the work, its difficult to deliver something quantitative and tangible on a consistent basis.

I think one huge failure of the industry so far has been to agree on even a basic set of what would qualify somebody to work professionally in it. If I'm a civil engineer, no matter how brilliant I might be, or what my pet projects look like, there's no way in hell i'm getting around a municipal project or getting a contract to build a bridge for a city without at least a PE certification.

Why doesn't something similar exist for programming? It would make sense given that programmers are responsible for things like Air Traffic Control systems, Automated dosing of drugs in hospitals, and a lot of "mission critical" systems that impact millions of people.

The big difference: programming is a creative endeavour (1) whereas accounting for the most part, is not (2).

(1) Even when working on a precise assignment, the latitude of choice, style and tools one can employ is much wider than in most other professions. It's also rare that there is a single, well understood and uncontroversial way to perform a task.

(2) Yes, even taking "creative accounting" into account.