It's as if the notion of people being arbitrarily born more or less with a knack for something is evil.
Let me tell you the story of when I realized I was (at best), a "not-mediocre" dev:
1. I've been programming for fun even as a kid. That's what got me into it: If you count kid-programming as "programming", I've been programming for ~14-15 years.
2. There was a girl who used to work with me at $DAYJOB, who is fairly well-known on The Orange Website, and has written some "thought leader" papers in certain niches. A real einstein.
"A couple of years -- and a few of those were writing another language. This is my first real job writing $LANGUAGE_WELL_KNOWN_FOR."
This is called "innate ability". Humans aren't created equal, nobody said they had to be, and it's not a crime to acknowledge it. Folks ought to get over it IMO, it's not a big deal.
I will never understand CS and programming-language theory concepts at that caliber or that intuitively, but who cares?
I'm also short as fuck so I doubt I'll be playing in the NBA anytime soon either. Life goes on.
That is similar to programming: even if you have everything clear in your head, you know how to do every single thing that is written in the requirements of the program, you still have to type it out.
A lot of time I thought, well this is fairly easy, and then spent I month just typing out code.
The only situation where really a more experienced programmer can be more or less 10 times faster than a non experienced one is in debugging/troubleshooting problems, because with more experience he tends to know by experience where it's most likely that the problem is and thus test in that direction.
It's not about writing a regular boring CRUD app that no one cares about as fast as 10 regular developers. It's about choosing the right problems to solve on their own initiative, building the foundation of a technology organization that can sustainably & quickly grow in scope and users, being the first to solve a problem no one else has understood such that the organization crushes their competition and so on.
Leading the development of web software that scales to 100 million users in 2003. Planning novel computer vision algorithms to a vehicle fleet of millions of vehicles, running on custom hardware they've also made contributions towards. Realizing that consumer VR headsets are now _just barely possible_ if you do everything right, and bringing it to market. Etc.
This is the difference between a small organization being capable of solving a difficult business problem and achieving profitability, and not.
Bad analogies aside, as others already pointed out, the biggest gain is usually on more creative and architectural tasks with amplified impact, where the requirements given are not as clear as code. Not how fast you change a bolt or type 100LOC. Instead, for example choosing the right tools instead of reinventing your own, or writing a composable interface that enables integration with other tools instead of of an unmaintainable spaghetti monstrosity.
The impact that creating something new can have can range from changing the course of history, to literally nothing (like most everything I've written).
Programmers and mechanics have a vastly different impact potential than one another.
No: One developer probably cannot _type_ x10 as fast as another. But they might be able to write code that can cure cancer -- while you/I can only regurgitate the same CRUD app over and over.
Experience and the skill to remember or recall well, help a lot with engineering.
I don’t think it’s that people have a problem admitting that there are significant outliers. It’s that there’s a backlash to the fetishization of “hiring 10x programmers” and most people claiming to be one really aren’t.
I know I’m good at it, but I am not and will probably never get to 10x on just writing code. I’ve worked with people who have a better claim to being a 10x. And having seen that, I have also never encountered any company that claims to hire 10x engineers that actually has a process to consistently hire even 1-2x engineers.
Even so at my companies the difference between between good engineers and bad is massive (a lot of the difference is talent and motivation). Imagine you had a company full of shitty engineers, a motivated good engineer in the right could deliver 10x the value of some shit engineer
What gets me is when I meet many of these “innate talent” coders I get to hear phrases like:
“I just want to work with the best possible team…”
And then from their behaviour, you see how they get irritated with the regular folks and try and convince everyone that if we all just “be more like them” it’ll all work better.
Many of them are blind to how much their talents make what is easy for them, very hard for the rest of us.
I call this the “talented arrogance” syndrome.
See also: Asking very old people how they managed to win so long.
there are just so many variables that go into human cognition. Belief. Drive. Focus. Grit. Exposure to ideas. Social support. Physical resources. Exercise. Health.
Each of these contribute, in some way, to every moment we spend learning. They are always changing. Each moment we learn affects the outcome of the next. It's Conway's game of life in n-dimensions.
My second question, and this is perhaps more important; what is the effect of a belief in innate talent? What don't you do or try because you believed it wouldn't work? Because you believed you couldn't? What do you beliefs cost you?
I realize my questions are pointed, and for that I apologize. They are, however, genuine.
Turns out environment can only really have _detrimental_ effects on outcomes for kids. You can't increase what they don't have, but you definitely can fuck them up. I thought it was pretty interesting.
So basically, the advice most parents get now is, don't drop them on their head :) Of course, that also means provide them with the opportunities to learn / use their ability.
Bias and poor processes. When people become reliant upon a technique or process to attain viability that means of execution becomes more important than the thing you are producing. As a result people will defend slow unproductive means of execution to the death. This is also a socially reinforced phenomenon.
It is completely realistic to achieve 10x (or even much greater) productivity and it isn’t challenging, but it requires abandonment of closely held ideas that are socially reinforced.
OK, you piqued my curiosity. Can you elaborate?
Objective quick wins:
1) Less code. The less there is the less there is to debug and maintain. This applies to all code including dependencies, frameworks, abstractions, and decoration in your own code. If abandoning OOP means substantially less code then do it without question.
2) Iterate faster. If you have a build that takes 10 minutes and the next guy has a build that takes less than a minute they can fail 10x more frequently and achieve the same level of productivity.
3) Know your foundations with confidence. Things you rely upon become more of a barrier than a help given a long enough time line (shorter time line that could otherwise imagine).
4) The point of software is automation. If you find you are doing manual curation in the code you are likely wasting your productivity. An investment in better automation returns interest on the initial investment.
More opinionated personal preferences:
1) Unless you are writing in a language where you manage access to memory, such as C++ or Rust, abandon OOP. In garbage collected languages like Java, JavaScript, C# it only provides composition. It is a tremendous increase in code that does more harm in troubleshooting.
2) Prefer a statically typed language. As a JavaScript developer I have fallen in love with TypeScript. There are performance benefits to ensuring all primitives are strongly typed, but the developer performance benefits come from typing complex types. This is a quick win for defining execution of microservices and functional programming.
3) Prefer functional programming techniques and code portability. Code is less defective when it is highly predictable and explicit.
4) Save composition for last. Don't worry about how to put things together. Complete each micro-task in isolation, which forces a separation of concerns. Once everything is written putting things together becomes natural and typically works itself out.
5) Avoid pronouns in the code. The pronoun of JavaScript is the keyword this. Don't use it. You don't need it. I have been writing in this language full time for 13 years both at work and for personal projects. In that time I have really needed this only twice. The problem with pronouns is that they aren't clear (in either value or intention) by just reading the code, which takes substantially more time to interpret as a human.
6) Think in writing. You can save some refactoring effort by having a solid execution plan. The best way to plan is write things down as if to explain it to somebody who has no idea. If you cannot even explain it to yourself you won't be able to do in code.
Think about all the kickass Python libraries people have wrote. Those provide 10x value across the board to entire industries.
Because it's not in their interest to accept it openly.
What would be the point of a employer to tell their employees that they are mediocre at best and no matter how hard they try they will never shine? That is the exact opposite of the carrot dangling ever slightly out of reach.
Why would someone blessed by luck tell their employees he didn't get there by working himself to death?
McDonalds is a money printing machine despite not using world class chefs. Telling everybody they can code depending on effort and hiring them for relatively cheap is a solid business plan.
I'm great at writing, simplifying technical concepts, and strategizing on larger projects, so I try to work to those strengths, which usually means making my PM's life a hell of a lot easier.
The stretch from person A is a better programmer / SW engineer than B to 'thus, person A is innately better' is unnecessary.
In my experience, the programmer that spends more time programming is almost always better than the one who does not. You can hate side projects, open-source work, whatever as much as you want, but IME, the programmers that engage in that (and thus have multiple times more actual experience than one who works 9-5) are universally the 10x people.
In other words, it's not innate intelligence... it's simple effort and working towards improvement.
Now... there are some people that are truly just stellar, and I can attribute perhaps some of this to innate ability, but the difference between mediocre programmer and 10x is typically one of hard work. Between 10x and the extremely rare 100x... well maybe we can talk brain differences. Those programmers are so rare though, it's futile to expect you'd be able to hire them, since there's not enough supply. 10x is good enough.
The usual correlation-vs-causation disclaimer goes here. How many open source developers spend time on it because they produce good code?
I spent quite a bit of time on side projects and helping (as I thought) others with projects that I like. After many years of doing this I have come to the conclusion that I simply cannot produce really good code. So rather than being a drain on already overworked maintainers I decided not to bother them anymore. Seeing a few others starting 5-10 years later and quickly outrunning me is quite discouraging, but such is life.
> "I spent quite a bit of time on side projects and helping (as I thought) others with projects that I like. After many years of doing this I have come to the conclusion that I simply cannot produce really good code."
Who cares if it's "GOOD" code -- did you have fun/did you enjoy it? It surely couldn't have been SHIT code, because you cared even the slightest degree.
Statistically, I figure most people writing code don't give a rat's ass and are there to pay rent.
"GOOD" is just skewed by the fact that you can also write code so brilliant it changes the course of humanity -- that's quite an upper bound to place on "great" or "10/10" code.
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On the topic of "x10 Developer/Engineer" and terminology:
You know "that 1 genius kid in the grade/school" who is just on a completely different level -- that's been my experience with these "x10" programmers.
There's a 17 year old in the Scala Discord (christ, she's legally a CHILD!) that I thought was a 30-something with some higher degree and was teaching me a bunch of stuff. I about spit out my drink when it casually came up in conversation from some older regular that she was 17.
Half of what she says I can't understand.
That's the sort of thing that comes to mind, for me anyways. Even though I live and breathe code, I think I'd have to be delusional to think I'd ever be as competent as her.
I could maybe memorize the amount of KNOWLEDGE she has currently, but there's a depth of understanding that I can't begin to comprehend.
I love programming, I’m good at it, but what I do with my free time isn’t necessarily related to programming but is still definitely productive. I read up on economics, politics, maybe write a few essays or short stories, work out, pick up a new skill or something. Somehow being a holistic person is now considered mediocre?