- What is a 10x programmer (what do they do better?)
- What is the impact of their presence (or absence) on a company
A 10x programmer is not someone who completes a narrowly defined task at 10x the speed of another engineer.
> In a controlled environment, the variation between most software engineers is much more modest.
Of course!
If you ask people to implement a small component as part of a large architecture that was already decided .. you won't find much of a difference in performance (unless you have people who are truly and utterly incompetent).
The excellent engineers would come up with a different design to begin with, but you can't measure that in a controlled study.
Now, knowing that 10x engineers exist, how can you use that to your advantage if you're a manager of a company?
If you yourself are not an excellent programmer, you can't just hire excellent programmers and hope they improve your business.
You will be fighting with them over control.
The key is to have excellent programmers in powerful position where they can call the shots about how to hire and manage and reward people.
If you are willing to give them that kind of power, then you have no business reading articles like this on the internet.
If you are not yourself an excellent engineer and are not willing to share power with excellent engineers, then no amount of reading of such articles on the internet will help you make the right decisions.
- What is a 10x programmer (what do they do better?)
- What is the impact of their presence (or absence) on a company
A 10x programmer is not someone who completes a narrowly defined task at 10x the speed of another engineer.
> In a controlled environment, the variation between most software engineers is much more modest.
Of course!
If you ask people to implement a small component as part of a large architecture that was already decided .. you won't find much of a difference in performance (unless you have people who are truly and utterly incompetent).
The excellent engineers would come up with a different design to begin with, but you can't measure that in a controlled study.
Now, knowing that 10x engineers exist, how can you use that to your advantage if you're a manager of a company?
If you yourself are not an excellent programmer, you can't just hire excellent programmers and hope they improve your business.
You will be fighting with them over control.
The key is to have excellent programmers in powerful position where they can call the shots about how to hire and manage and reward people.
If you are willing to give them that kind of power, then you have no business reading articles like this on the internet.
If you are not yourself an excellent engineer and are not willing to share power with excellent engineers, then no amount of reading of such articles on the internet will help you make the right decisions.