I don’t understand what people mean by 10x programmer.
My first exposure to the term were meme type descriptions that seemed to describe 10x programmers as fast, but also implied a lot of negative qualities, anti social, no time for meetings / communication / documentation.
I thought it was a joke meme making fun of very fast but ultimately flawed programmers…. but then I realized some people were serious and sorta glorifying the negative aspects as well.
> I don’t understand what people mean by 10x programmer.
So chances are you've never seen one. Now I wonder how are our experiences so different, because I've known a bunch and I've worked at that level sometimes.
> I thought it was a joke meme making fun of very fast but ultimately flawed programmers…. but then I realized some people were serious and sorta glorifying the negative aspects as well.
That makes sense because there's a lot of egos involved in this topic. When you are doing most of the job of the team, obviously you're tempted to make it a part of your identity.
But also it makes other people jealous and they look for a way to justify, blur, compensate and explain it away. In this matter, denial often comes from insecurities. Some of the incarnations:
- There aren't 10x programmers, it's just because sometimes 1x programmers are surrounded by 0.1x programmers.
- 10x programmers generates 100x maintenance when they leave.
- There are 10x programmers, but they're not you, only a handful of geniuses in the world.
- There are 10x programmers, but they're jerks and a company is better off without them.
etc. (Sometimes the criticisms are justified, but not always)
If you've never seen one, maybe it's because:
- You're working in a line of work that deals with solved problems, incremental solutions.
- You're working in a process-heavy team. Either 10x people flees from that or the process makes them invisible.
The specific number ten is tricky because in a healthy environment, the effect tends to dilute. The difference often appears when a team penetrates into the jungle of a new technology. Some people are much better trail blazers than others and in that situation 10x or even higher multipliers are not unusual.
But once the mechanics are known and the pitfalls are spotted, the difference should be much smaller, provided knowledge is properly transmitted through documentation, pairing or whatever.
Actually, a wise boss won't put the 10x programmer to work in parallel with the rest, but some weeks ahead, as a minesweeper.
Edit: another area in which some programmers are much better than others is bug hunting. But again, there's a moment when every evil schrödinger-ish bug is fixed.
I think the term was, if not invented, then at least popularised by Joel Spolsky in one of his blog posts. Initially the term was purely positive and did not imply any negative traits.
The core argument of the blog post was that focusing on things like scrum vs agile and different testing methodologies and programming languages etc doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the actual programmers you hire. Hiring the right programmer will have 10x impact on your overall productivity compared to choosing the right project management or testing methodology.
I believe the term comes from a study done my Tom Demarco, and was about developer performance across companies, on an equal task, with a somewhat controlled level of experience.
It def wasn't about some guy on my team rocks, but about this company over here does better work. That meaning isn't really how its used now though.
The study was "Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace"
My first exposure to the term were meme type descriptions that seemed to describe 10x programmers as fast, but also implied a lot of negative qualities, anti social, no time for meetings / communication / documentation.
I thought it was a joke meme making fun of very fast but ultimately flawed programmers…. but then I realized some people were serious and sorta glorifying the negative aspects as well.