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0 pointsNineStarPoint4y ago0 comments

Realistically, I’ve always found it a weird sentiment more because issues caused by software developers are not of the “this person is 1/10 as productive as this other person” type. A bad developer isn’t a low positive effect on a project, but an active negative effect. As such, you can put literally any Y for a (Y)X programmer, since the scale of how inefficient a programmer can be goes up to infinite.

I think the pushback against 10X programmers comes primarily from the fact that many programmers who look good to managers (constantly push out new features) are in actuality an albatross around the necks of the other programmers who constantly have to fix the messes they create (in reality, a negative on team-wide production). What matters more to me in a teammate than how productive they are is to ensure that they are on the positive side of the scale at all, which the perceived 10X programmer is often actually a failure at.

Though I’ve definitely met people who just have such a wide knowledge base and think so quickly that they are in fact 10X as effective as a standard productive programmer, so I do understand where the idea comes from.

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pjc504y ago

More people should be aware of Comrade Stakhanov, the "10x miner": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov

> In 1988, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed that the widely cited achievements of Stakhanov were puffery. The paper insisted that Stakhanov had used a number of helpers on support works, while the throughout was tallied for him alone. Still, according to the newspaper, Stakhanov's approach had eventually led to increased productivity by means of a better work organization, including specialization and task sequencing

Exactly the same discussion, except there it was tonnes of coal which can be easily and unambiguously measured. But they can't be easily attributed. How much of his work was really that of his team? And how much of it was simply inflation by his managers for propaganda purposes? And how much of it was, underneath all the propaganda, real process improvements?

CRConrad4y ago

TAN: I fearst heard of "Stachanovism" over forty years ago, in my teens. Some time before that I had read an anthology of American folk tales, so to me Comrade Alexei Grigorijevitj was always kind of a Soviet version of John Henry. Made it easier, when I later found out, to accept that Stachanov was also at least in part a myth...

cutemonster4y ago

Yes attribution can be hard.

At the same time, if one compares shoveling coal and laying bricks with software, then it'd be good to smash and destroy bricks, throw the coal back into the mine, raze houses. (Reducing the amount of code)

Software would be more comparable to designing the coal mining site, or architecturing a city (but not building it). And then maybe it's simpler to see, that individuals sometimes can have much impact.

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