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I worked with a 10x developer once, he was awful and I couldn't stand to work with him. Although he could produce an insane amount of code and functionality his presence was like throwing a grenade into the middle of the dev team everyday. He left to take a job at google and the overall team productivity went up significantly. He basically did 10X individually,but took 11x away from the team. So team work is pretty darn important.

I think that wasn't a 10x programmer, then.

I've worked with 10x programmers, and while certainly a lot of their value is simply their ability to write code, they also have a lot of value because they help other people excel. The 10x programmers I've worked with are people who push for code reviews, better tools, proper testing, realistic timelines, good communication with clients, etc.

And in the long run, those programmers made the programmers around them better. A 10x programmer creates a lot of 2x-5x programmers. I'm maybe a 3x programmer and it's because a lot of 10x programmers have taken the time to help me get better.

Here's my favorite quote by @bmdhacks that reflects my experience dealing with such people:

How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up.

https://twitter.com/bmdhacks/status/560949130999365633

Spot on!

> How to be a 10x engineer: Incur technical debt fast enough to appear 10x as productive as the ten engineers tasked with cleaning it up.

We have a guy in our onsite team that keeps making our user facing application suck with his changes one day and then fix those every other day. So lots of git commits but limited productivity in the team, and a very tough maintainence task for every developer in the team.

I think you're misunderstanding what "10x developer" is supposed to mean. The impression I've gotten is that they are considered to be 10 times as productive because of the work they don't do. They write code that has less bugs, is more scalable, requires less refactoring, is easier for other developers to understand, etc. You'd never see it in LOC or sprint points completed, but there'd be a noticeable difference of pace between a project of 10x devs and a project with 1x devs.

I wanted to reply to all the comments so I just decided to reply to my own comment. For those telling me I'm misinterpreting what a 10x dev is, I don't think a solid definition of the 10x developer actually exists it's mostly in the eye of the beholder.

I think it's mostly in what other people think of them especially that guy that hands out raises. So it's incredibly subjective.

I say a 10x developer is someone that can create features 10x faster than everyone else, regardless of their other skills.

To be clear my dream rockstart software engineer is not a 10x developer. They are 5x developer, a 5x Team player, 5x architect and 10x Mentor. So maybe we need a dictionary of terms around what people by various nicknames and concepts given to the various kinds of software developers.

I agree everyone has their own definition, but the one you are giving is a pointy-haired definition, where the only metric is LoC and a successful demo of some feature.

Even though it's hard to measure a lot of things like technical debt, architectural benefits, bugs, edge case handling, UX polish, teamwork, etc, it doesn't mean that you can reasonably get away with discounting those effects when you talk about 10x. The 10x is referring to productivity, which is implicitly a net measure (gross productivity is just activity, and no one willingly pays for that).

So yeah, you can be 10x in terms of cranking out working code a lot faster (rare), but if that is blowing other people up then it's not meaningful to say they are more productive, in fact it's extremely harmful to risk putting them on a pedestal like this in front of clueless management. For me, true 10x is more intangible than cranking out functionality, it's more about the ability to reconcile the details with the big picture, and zeroing in on solutions that solve the most problems and create the fewest. How this actually looks in practice varies from project to project, but I think it rarely correlates with sustaining a 200wpm typing speed for 8 hours a day.

I'm going to quote this on my blog, I love everythin about this comment.

Wow thanks, let me know where your blog is.

impressmyself.co , It probably won't be up until next week sometime though. I have to figure how I want to write the blog post, and then actually do it.

Those exist too. It's possible to be really good at something but to be so awful at everything else that the net effect is zero to negative. But not all "10X developers" are assholes.

That may be a men/women thing, but I actually screen for that when I'm interviewing and significantly prefer to hire people that say "we did X" rather than "I did X". It's my job as an interviewer to figure out which person on that team you were, but if you describe your work as I I I I I and never We We We We, it is pretty telling.

It also goes for managing. If my team fucked something up, I say "I fucked up Y", even if it was a report of mine. If my team did something great, it's a "We did Z" even if I did it alone.

When you put it out that plainly, it sounds hokey and stupid. But trust me, over the long run those tiny things are the difference between a good company culture and a bad company culture.

It's interesting that you say your bias is toward perceiving someone self-reporting as working on a team as "everyone on the team did the work but me".

Does this result from primarily working alone, or have you just been granted license to be more autonomous than most coders I know? A lot of shops both employ pair programming and have a series of pairs working on one project, or have a t the very least a bunch of people working on different aspects of the project.

Of course this could be spun as "I did y for my project, x" but I'm curious as to why "As part of the team working on x project, I did y" sounds less like accomplishing something technical to you.

Say I had a project out of which I'm submitting 3-4 conference papers to various conferences for publication, working with my advisor and another student. Would it be better to say I did it all, or to be honest and say the other student did 1/3, I did 2/3, and my advisor helped shape our vision?

I felt the same as 'api' when he explained that and to me, it came from my bad experiences working on teams, in high school, where 1 or 2 people did all the work and the rest rode the coattails to an easy A.

Of course my experiences in high school shouldn't factor into my judgement of reading judging peoples capabilities (because chances are everyone worked on a team that did X). Something like that might just be a hidden cultural bias - I'm sure everyone has an experience where they forced to worked with others who didn't feel like pulling their weight - and its those negative experiences that shape our notions of what it means to work on a team, rather than the multitude of positive experiences we may have had.

I have often worked alone, but not always. I've never worked in a pair programming shop, and I would probably find it distracting for anything but debugging or syncing up. The trouble is that complex programming tasks usually have the nature where communicating the ideas takes longer than simply coding them. You'd spend all your time syncing state between you and the other person.

But I don't think this explains the bias. I'm not really sure where it comes from but I found it interesting.

I read a book about the development of writing in mesopotamia (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674049683 , but I can't really recommend it as a general-interest book); it mentioned that a particular king had seen his city flourish under his rule and boasted accordingly, in the records we have, of how irrigation canals were dug and roads were built and generally a lot of great stuff happened on his watch.

In a parenthetical, it also noted that, as is typical for the records of the time, they actually attributed all these works to the king personally ("I dug canals in XX regions").

> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X.

I find this a very interesting fact, but I see a number of other possible explanations for "I do X": - It is simply shorter. Men being used to more compact communication? - It is also more boastful - perhaps men being used to market themselves more aggressively than women? Or, put in another words, having and/or presenting bigger egos in their CVs? - Women being insecure about their personal contribution in X? Maybe the coattail-riding assumption is not always wrong.

In any case, I would withhold judgement before an interview.

There's lots of possibilities. It's really hard to tell whether any of these things are cultural or come from actual gender dimorphism (to use the technical biological term). Ultimately it doesn't matter if they are irrelevant to ability.

What I'm saying is that when we are evaluating peoples' abilities, we should take care to evaluate actual ability rather than unreliable proxies for ability. The latter are prejudices, basically, and they blind us to a lot of talent that might not fit those lazy filters.

I'm neither a "PC liberal" nor a conservative/reactionary on this issue. Liberals pretend differences in ability don't exist, while conservatives like to defend the accuracy of our "gut" prejudices and argue there's nothing wrong. IMHO equality of opportunity comes when people make an effort to look at actual ability as objectively as possible.

It's in your best interest as an employer to do this. Good people are very hard to find, and if you're running some kind of dumb ape-brain filter that excludes ~50% of the population from consideration you are handicapping your recruitment efforts pretty badly. Think like a human being.

I (male, for the record, but gender-specific behavior isn't my point here) used to write/say that I was "part of a team" that did X or "worked on a team" that did Y, but I stopped doing it for a couple reasons, the most prominent being that "worked on a team that..." is usually obvious given the context of the conversation and the scale of the work discussed. In those cases, explicitly mentioning it feels like you're going out of the way to distance yourself from the work and describe yourself as a bystander - someone who just happened to be on the team that did this great work.

Personally, I hate phrases like "I worked on a team that did X" because I can't tell what you did. Where you the lead, a junior, or did you get called in when everything exploded and saved the day?

I'd rather see "I did the Y on the team that did X" as it's more descriptive and leaves less to my imagination.

> " Women would highlight the cooperative nature of their work, while men would highlight that they did it all themselves. In my experience the latter is typically more honest, especially if you actually were working on a team or on a team-oriented college project.

Did you mean to say the former was more honest, i.e. that saying “we did X” is more honest than “I did X?"

Yes. Edited.

It depends on the context of course. If it was your project alone, then you did it. If others contributed non-trivial amounts, it was a team effort. I noted that the males tended to bury that, while the females tended to highlight it.

I really want to hear what the individual contributed, though, and actually couldn't care less what their team did as a whole. I've heard way too many "we"s that were actually "they"s, while the subject was present, but not actually contributing that much. It's really easy for a bad developer to hide in a large team.

EDIT: and it's also easy for a good developer to get quagmired in a bad team! Just because the project as a whole didn't do much doesn't mean the individual is bad. So I still really only want to hear about the individual efforts.

You're missing one final problem: it's easy for a bad developer to talk themselves up.

This would be why I spend almost no effort on the interview process. I put people to work right away to force them to prove whether or not they can do the job.

Well, I suppose they could be subcontracting it out, but at that point, I don't care. The work is getting done and at a price I can manage.

Well I think the more honest part is I myself worked on part X and we the team created product Y made out these multiple parts. How big of a part you had does matter.

For example, I made the iOS UI part of this text chat app, and my team members created data models and networking code that I used to make the UI part. Another team member made the android part using the cross platform code and a bunch of others made the server part and so on. Together we made a text chat app pair.

> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X."

While this anecdote seems to match traditional gender narratives, I'm interested in how you knew the men "obviously did the same kind of work."

You observed that women were more likely than men to emphasize teamwork and not their individual contributions. It seems that there are two hypotheses which result from that:

1. Women are more likely to emphasize team aspects and de-emphasize their contribution (less narcissistic)

2. Women are less likely to individual contribute and more likely to rely on teams for projects (less independent)

How did you differentiate between those two?

I think programming challenges are the only recruitment tool we have that can cut through this and many other similar questions.

"Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X." Women would highlight the cooperative nature of their work, while men would give the impression that they did it all themselves."

Cannot emphasise this quote enough. It is the difference between, "We" and "I", the basis of any community where you put yourself second. It is also the essence of good leadership.

If you want a lone wolf programmer as a new-hire in a small startup, maybe this type isn't for you. As your company grows, the type of programmer described by @api above, the one who works in teams where your livelyhood and codebase is on the line, is the person I'd want to work with and for.

I'm not an athlete, but I'll run a mile against anyone who claims to be 10X faster than me.

> Women would say things like "I worked on a team that did X," while men -- who obviously did the same kind of work -- would simply say "I did X."

Depending on what X is, and on context, it can be obvious that "worked on X" simply means that they worked on X, but that doesn't mean that others did not also work on it, with them. Especially if "X" is too big and complex for one person to do on ones own. In particular, researchers in CS (maybe coincidentally majority of men) tend to say that they "work on" or "are interested in" X, Y, Z - but that doesn't really mean that they don't collaborate or work with other people on those things. It's not exclusionary at all.

But this interpretation doesn't fit with the usual men-are-egotistical-narcissists-compared-to-women. So pay this comment no mind.

"But this interpretation doesn't fit with the usual men-are-egotistical-narcissists-compared-to-women. So pay this comment no mind."

I'm just reporting the patterns I saw. That's all.

I wouldn't say "egotistical narcissist," just that the culture probably holds out different behavioral expectations for men and women and that gives rise to differences in how people present themselves.

> I'm just reporting the patterns I saw. That's all.

Well let's not kid ourselves. :) If a pattern you happened to observe reflected poorly on women - like if you observed that many more of them were incompetent than men[1] - you wouldn't report on it here. Or else you would just get downvoted or ignored. Can you honestly object to that?

Casually reporting on something which shows women as a group (or subgroup, like in tech) is viewed at best as being in poor taste, or at worst as sexism or misogyny. And there are good arguments for calling it that. But do the same for men and it's just innocuous "observations".

[1] For the sake of the argument: totally hypothetical.