PHP and node come to mind immediately.

Ruby is down right retarded with promoting Concerns for modeling cross cutting concerns and fat controller/model is a pattern for creating technical debt.

Dealing with python environments and packages makes me want to avoid python if at all possible.

Using C# and Java means I'm probably going to have 3 projects for a hello world.

I'm not positively opinionated about my tools - it's more about deciding which one sucks least for a particular task.

I subscribe to the 'strong opinions, weakly held' model. It's necessary to have opinions about things you're involved with. However, the real art is to be able to not be too attached to one's opinions, be open to change them, and be able to be a productive team member, even if there is a decision to do things in a way that doesn't conform to one's opinions even when the opinions haven't changed.

And they'll say it's "best practice".

"best practice" has basically come to mean "whatever that particular developer knows/likes"

I don't have a hate/love opinion on most things. I may have an opinion on wether or not one particular technical choice is contextually a good or bad idea. I may not be able to form an opinion.

Somewhat related: Rich Hickey (of Clojure fame) makes the point that one of the disappointing aspects of the software development community is that there's so much talk about 'better', and so little about trade-offs.

I don't have 20 years of experience yet. But my PoV is as follows: assume as much as you can and ensure that if those assumptions are broken, you have fail-fast-and-log triggers (when it's possible). So when that trigger hits, you'll understand what assumption is broken. For example in Java I'll write Objects.requireNonNull(x, "x") and move on. If that assumption is broken, I'll have stack trace in my logs and I'll write additional logic. It won't take much time. But if that assumption will not be broken, I just saved few hours of time and few dozens of LoC from future maintenance.

Some people hate NullPointerExceptions and want to get rid of them. I love them. They're incredibly useful for me.

This attitude belies the fact that of the 1000s of assumptions you make every day 1 or 2 will end up being incorrect, but it's usually very, very hard or even impossible to know which in advance.

Some other ways of looking at this: compilers are an impressive force multiplier. When you compare the size of the source and the size of the executable, it's easy to see how much work you avoid. Compilers allow one single person to create way bigger programs. That would also explain why some people are so insistent on Lisp: macros are compilers. If you can write your own compiler, you can increase even more your own productivity.

This raises the question of why not everyone uses Lisp. The answer is collaboration. Collaboration happens when people share a mental model of things. The bigger the language, the harder it is to find lots of people that share that entire mental model. This may be why you often hear programmers with a lot of experience that prefer "small and simple" things, like C or Go. It makes collaboration easier. Dynamic vs static typing might be the same. It's about "how much context you need in your head at all time". If you have a lot of context in your head, it's easy to think about things succinctly. But when people don't have the same context as you or you lose yours, understanding their short and full of context code might be very hard. Spaghetti programs are that, a mix of context. You can't take one spaghetti out. You have the same exact problem in parsing, context-free vs context-sensitive grammar.

I don't know if and how the context-free vs context-sensitive ideas translate in terms of people. If anyone really likes using Lisp or Go or Haskell, I would be interested in your opinion about my "theory", and if you think that preference for context-free or context-sensitive applies to other parts of your life or personality.

    * Software is a social service.  Its for other humans.

The fact that this attitude is common scares me when I'm doing interviews.

Time off is incredibly important to me. What's the use of making a great income if you can't get the time off to enjoy it?

The culture about the use of PTO varies wildly between companies. A friend of mine worked somewhere that supposedly gave 20 days PTO per year, but trying to actually use more than a single day at a time was always met with denials, and even if you did take a Friday off, you were expected to work 10 hours/day the other 4 days of that week to make up for it.

So yeah, when I'm interviewing, I want to know how much time people are taking off, but I don't want the interviewer to think I'm lazy and will be trying to avoid work as much as possible.

You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time. And not understanding that makes you a bad programmer by my book simply because this is the foundation of the job.

So let me give one advice: you are not producing code, you are engineering code. Some will find solutions that the others will not find. Thats where the 10x programmer thing come from. The guy who wrote bittorrent said something like the following: "I've written bittorrent in a way you would never have thought about".

You think John Carmack was the only one trying to make 3d games when Doom came out? Thousands of programmers where trying to. Does that make him a 10x programmer in your opinion? Or more like a 1000x?

0.1x programmers are often lost or afraid, although they may just be unimaginative. The real risk of fear is introducing 0.1x processes. People are often willing to sacrifice any amount of development velocity to avoid being seen to make mistakes.

Sometimes this makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. Arguably the reason for the success of SpaceX is that they were willing to fly, crashland, and improve a dozen rockets in the time that a conventional company would spend agonizing over whether to launch at all. On the other hand, nobody wants to be on the same roads as the "move fast and break things" self-driving car.

I've been a developer for 15 years... anybody else feel like the further they get into their career, the more they want to keep their opinions to themselves?

I feel like as a junior dev I had way stronger opinions and I was a lot more vocal about them. Now, I still have opinions, but I've learned that nobody gives a damn about my opinions so I just keep them to myself.

Just like "avoid the 0.1x programmers", interviews are for weeding out the really bad team mates. They aren't for finding the best ones.

For instance, I and a female programmer do the interviews. During one interview, my coworker kept asking questions of the candidate, and he would not look at her when he talked. He would actually talk to me instead while answering her questions.

My first through was that he was misogynistic, which is an automatic disqualification. But even if he was just shy, he's going to have to work with her daily for the first few months, and be in meetings with her for the entire time he worked there.

That's an extreme example, but there were plenty of instances where we were looking for the best candidate, and the interview made the decision easier when the code hadn't. We can only hire 1 candidate, and we have to do what we can to pick the one that will do the best work and get along best with the team.

That's what interviews are for.

Keeping that in mind, I'm continually amazed at the number of developers who just love complexity. Don't get me wrong, they all profess to strive for simplicity but their work betrays them. They just love intricate dances carefully coordinated across several components, never minding how anyone 5, 10, 15 or 20 years down the road will ever comprehend this madness or how it will ever be maintained without incurring exorbitant costs.

I religiously adhere to the KISS principle - Keep It Stupid Simple. Once you think it's simple look for ways to make it even more simple. Think about operations failing at the worst time of day possible on the worst possible day of the year - how will you quickly find and resolve the issue? What if it's a new hire who gets the call? I'm just amazed at how developers gloss over this, all while bitching about the "spaghetti code" they inherited. It boggles the mind.

1) "No, my 37 day interview process is good, actually."

2) "Rails sucks"

3) "Making a thing people would want to use is a bad idea."

4) (two long threads) "The 10x programmer exists, I saw him once at a con."

5) "No one cares what anyone else thinks."

HN really does represent the finest that the largest corporations have to offer. The proof is in the pudding.

+1. Most (including me) internalise, if at all, this lesson the hard way through trial and error.

I wish this is was taught in colleges. Software is mostly about manipulating data and it's a pity that not much is taught in a structured manner about building systems around data.

I expected Domain Driven Design (DDD) would address this but it doesn't.

> “How can you not know what BGP is?”

I learned a while ago that answering someone who asks you "What is X?" and replying with a phrase similar to the above is probably one of the worst ways to broach the subject. It comes off as questioning the person's intelligence/knowledge.

Instead try to see it as a teachable moment. If it is something you think is cool and/or you are passionate about, you should be excited that you can show your friend/coworker something really cool. ie: "I've never seen Rick and Morty", "You are absolutely going to love that show. I know what you will be binge watching this weekend!"

Anyhow, to put it bluntly, don't be a dick about it.

>> Nobody asks “why” enough

This point is the most important IMO. It's so common for people to do things without asking themselves why they're doing it. Every line of code should fulfill a clear purpose. You want to avoid writing code which is difficult to explain to a non-technical person.

>> People don’t really want innovation... If you believe in what you’re doing, and know it will really improve things, then brace yourself for a long battle.

This sounds ridiculous at a glance, but it 100% matches my own experience in pretty much every company and project I've ever worked on.

It applies to everything; jobs, getting funding. Nobody wants to see real innovation and nobody wants to see real talent. If you're too good as a developer and innovate too much, developers who work for big companies will get jealous and they will reject you. If you're very good, you need to pretend to be mediocre and above all; compliant.

Projects are like a balancing act where you need to weigh the pros and cons of every choice and choose the best one. The hard part is being able to do that and do it in a reasonable amount of time.

Yes, yes and yes. Many times we lose sight of the fact our job is to support the business (money-making) functions of the company. The software itself isn't the end-all-be-all point of what the organization does unless you write open source software all day long and survive off donations. My gut tells me that most departments are like this and sees themselves as the core of the company but I think software engineers think of themselves more highly than most (and more highly than they should). A bit of humility would really help - myself included more than most probably.

I agree with a lot of what he says... A few points are a little off IMHO but I've only been doing this for a few more years than this gentleman. Perhaps I'll feel differently in a few more. :)

1. Software development skill means nothing if the power goes out, always cultivate other skills and passions, those passions will drive you to develop more meaningful, functional, and well informed tools.

2. My resume never parses correctly on the job application, no matter how big the company is, and I'll always have to retype it over again.

3. The level of functionality on each company's web site job application tool tells you everything you need to know about the development quality and talent within each company.

I had a great interview with one of the FAANG companies. The technical interviews, 6 of them in a row!, felt more like they were wanting to see me fail spectacularly rather than focus on my approach of solving whiteboard problems. Still, I did more than average to get "pass" from them. But HR dropped me because she didn't like the answer to "what's your weakness?" question along the lines of - "I focus too much on job at hand to an extent that I struggle with work-life-balance and working on it. If I can overcome that and learn how to take breaks timely I might be more productive.". HR didn't like it because it was not one of the canned responses she was expecting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think I would add to that that 0.1x programmers are to some extent a product of their environment. Maybe there are people who are inherently 0.1x programmers and there's nothing anyone can do about it, but I think it's also the case that the local engineering culture can turn people into 0.1x programmers. So, the important thing is to figure out how that happens and don't do it.

Some examples: make people do arbitrary repetitive tasks. Hide information. Make infrastructure changes frequently to the point where people regularly have to ask "how do I do this important job function today?" Create domain-specific languages and don't document them. Use build systems that don't work reliably. Have CI systems that require users to wade through megabytes of errors to find the one line that failed. Invent new words for things, or use old words in creative new ways. Speak in acronyms. Create technical documentation (if at all) that never explains "why". Don't set aside time for training. If a question warrants a one-sentence answer, filibuster for ten minutes to prevent follow-up questions from being asked. If it warrants a ten minute answer, reply with a sentence. Especially if you're in a very different time zone, and every follow-up question adds 24 hours to task completion time. Treat "programming ability" as some immutable attribute that is conferred on developers by completion of a bachelor's degree in a computer-related field, and that these programmers are interchangeable and their skills always current and directly applicable to the task at hand. Create Byzantine labyrinths of web-based tools that none can navigate without first having been shown the way through.

The only thing about the 10x programmer saying that's a myth, is the assumption that it's a quality inherent to the person. You can absolutely accomplish the same level of impact in a week that might take a competent respectable colleague a year, and you don't have to be a genius to do it.

You just have to have a good idea at the right moment. It doesn't even have to be a constant thing. In my career, sometimes I'm just a normal programmer and sometimes I do some bona fide 10x work. A lot the times the 10x work I get the most kudos for will be some absurdly simple low-effort yet impactful thing, like sending pull requests to projects that change a single line of code to bump up a version number in an xml file that has 0days. But because the idea is so simple and almost silly, I can do it a few hundred times and have more impact. Then I can take into consideration that many of these projects I'm fixing are libraries or frameworks, so I'm not only rescuing the project but rescuing their users too.

That kind of transitive impact is what makes 10x possible. Programming isn't like a 19th century assembly line where labor had a very static measurable and manageable impact. Our culture is still catching up in fully understanding and internalizing the enabling impact that computers make possible.

Why all the money focus and not about craft and blah blah? Because you are a worker for a business. You will unlikely get to build your magnum opus at work and probably won’t have the energy to do that at the weekend (for most of us). So programming as a job is heavily about earning a living. Work hard, do a great job. If you are 10x then what are you doing working for someone else anyway? Are they paying you 1M a year?

These are people who will implement a feature with clean code, well commented, well thought-out and meeting the exact need, correctly structured, in the time that the entire rest of the engineering team would still be scratching their head and debating what to do. One guy years ago who refactored the entire backend at a startup in 2 days, then asked "OK, what can I work on now?" Another guy who wrote an IPC system we needed, which I'd expected would take us 6 weeks, and he did it over the weekend (and it worked perfectly). Another who debugged and patched a critical infrastructure problem in a very complex system, in about 2 days... and would do this time and again, just cranking out features and fixes, week after week.

* "Oh, but their code must have been rushed!" It was fast but not rushed. Some of the best code I've seen.

* "Oh, but they didn't consider user requirements." They did.

* "Oh, they must have been insufferable to work with!" For the most part, super friendly and great teammates.

And so on.

So, sorry if it offends, but some people are just much better developers than everyone else around them (including, possibly yourself). I was much happier after I realized and accepted this fact!

A week after the interview I was told that they don't want to continue with me because I didn't ask enough questions and that my solution wouldn't work if millions of people would use the system at the same time. I think I avoided a bullet

People talk about innovation a whole lot, but what they are usually looking for is cheap wins and novelty. If you truly innovate, and change the way that people have to do things, expect mostly negative feedback. If you believe in what you’re doing, and know it will really improve things, then brace yourself for a long battle.

Ain’t that the truth. I’ve come up against this my entire career.

This is so important. I think a lot of the advice given out there comes with the bias of having been successful doing it. There are countless others who have tried to scale the same ladder, doing the same things even, and still did not achieve the same success.

Very true... just yesterday someone posted about the Pony language main user switching to Rust:

https://www.wallaroo.ai/blog-posts/wallaroo-move-to-rust

Despite Pony being an impressive programming language, technically, with a lot of promise, pretty much only one company ever used it and now that it's moved on, Pony is pretty much in the camp "no one uses it".

And much of it is serendipity. A few tiny things could've happened differently, and now everyone would be talking about Pony, not Rust. Similarly, perhaps, happened with Ceylon (anyone remembers that??) VS Kotlin.

21. Do not mistake hype and popularity for quality.

22. The best code is no code, but configuration is worse than code. Maintaining 1000 lines of YAML is worse than 9000 lines of code.

23. The best code is no code, but replacing a script with a zoo of tools and libraries is often worse.

> People might claim they have “signals” for these things… “if they ask about time off in the first interview then they are never going to be there!” But these are all bullshit. If you’re using signals like these you’re just guessing and turning away good candidates

I do not need heroes, I need reliable folks who do not burn themselves out.

Or to put it in a cliche... I need people who work to live rather then live to work.

Personally, I've never not used all my PTO in a given year and would consider being unable to do so a show stopper.

I just ask the individual contributors how much PTO they've taken in the past 12 months. It's more or less an open question, doesn't necessarily means I'm interested in taking too much PTO. You'd be surprised of how honest people are. I had interviewees even start venting about burnout. Someone from an e-commerce company (not Amazon) told me he's gonna take a month off as he took 0 vacation days for the past 1.5 years (!!!). He admitted he's probably going to get in trouble but he doesn't care anymore.

If you’re dealing with a reasonable person, you should be able to preface the question by explaining how having sufficient time off helps you do your best work and avoid burnout, and that you want to clarify expectations up front to make sure that you and the company are an ideal match.

It’s also of course a bit less risky to bring up this sort of thing a bit later in the interview process when you’ve built a bit of a rapport with the interviewer and ideally demonstrated your value somewhat.

They said "hey, we shutdown anyway during the holidays you can take it then, just start now"

and of course, did he get to take that time off? NO.

However, I prefer having some free time for myself than accumulate a large amount of money.

Edit: sorry if that sounded offending but I can't wrap my head around the fact that people in US have problems of this kind

It's plenty of time for my employer to extract value from me. If the org wants me to work more, they can make me be in meetings less.

The issue isn’t taking time off, it’s that the prospective employee’s head is up their proverbial ass. First interview is propspecting. If you were selling a product, if the customer is asking about the return policy before even selecting an option, it’s a similar signal.

When you’re in a subsequent interview talking about the benefit plan, salary, etc, that’s where that sort of question is appropriate - you’re finalizing the deal.

I've also worked on teams that, same as your friend, heavily implied that taking longer leave breaks were a no-go.

As with all things, it's a balance.

You CAN refuse once the contract arrives for signature, the interview is a lot also for the company to have argument to sell you to management as a worthy investment.

I admit I never take a guy talking about time off myself, because while I agree it's an important contractual part and something we must give as generously as we can, the fact he asked the first minute of our relationship means it's going to be painful for him and for us, because we're not a paradise company, things can be tough and high pressure (investment bank), people not nice on purpose and sometimes you have to do the right thing rather than the perfect thing, so compliant positive nearly sacrificial profiles will be happily surprised by what's still good while a dude asking "and holidays, 20 or 25 days" the first day will be very sad and burnt out by all the shit.

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.

I think the idea of 10x programmers gets so much pushback because it's often bundled with this kind of toxic hero worship. There's a difference between acknowledging the impressive ability of outliers, and idolizing heroic one-man efforts as the pinnacle of what we should all aspire to as software developers.

Incidentally, Carmack was not the only programmer on early id Software games, and Doom was far from the first 3d first-person game made. Arguably, it wasn't even that ambitious compared to, say, Ultima Underworld, but the programmers working on that get much less immediate recognition.

As a matter of fact, these discussions often remind me of that famous IGN quote of Warren Spector. Except we really should know better on HN.

This is discussed in the book Make It Stick on learning science, in chapter 7 they discuss how your own views on whether skill is innate vs the result of practice affects your own ability to learn and grow.

In one analogy it could be the 10x bricklayer. One who does a well defined job 10 times faster than the others. I think this is the notion people oppose.

Another analogy is the 10x classical composer. A person who produces music that is 10 times better music. But this is much more about creative/artistic capacity than about producing. Nobody oppose this.

I that your examples incarnate the same idea: It is not about producing code faster. It is about having better ideas.

Most projects out there will not benefit from such a person. If you don't understand this, then in my book it makes you a poor employee. I mean, it's great if this 10x guy can solve some challenging problems that most people cannot, but if that 10x guy cannot show how it helps the business, I hope he's not in my team.

Most businesses are complex and messy. Connecting your code to business value is not easy.

Looking at some of the comments here, people are going out of their way to both defend the existence of 10x programmers, while simultaneously working very hard at not putting any kind of metric on their ability (e.g. "no, it doesn't mean they can produce 10x code or replace 10 people or ... it means <something very hard to measure>"). If you're going to insist on some quality that is hard to quantify, then stop using numbers to describe them. They are geniuses, but not 10x.

In my experience:

1. You cannot replace 10 average programmers with a 10x programmer and hope to achieve the same output. Output, by the way, is not defined by code, but by activities that help the business move forward.

2. While there are some good claimed 10x programmers who work well with others, most of the ones I've encountered do not. In my last job, we had a team of several truly brilliant folks. They could dive deep to the assembly level or work at the system level (scripting, etc). Any bottleneck that arose - they would dig deep and figure it out.

It was the least productive team I've been in. They argued amongst themselves on the pettiest of things that had no impact on the business. When asked why I was leaving the team, I literally told them that I want to be in a team that writes SW. That team's productivity was so low I couldn't reasonably claim they wrote SW. It's not that they didn't write code, but that most of it would not see the light of day because of constant bickering.

Even more impressive, much of the success of later titles came from his picking the likes of Abrash to help make things fast. Notably, the WTF comment in the "fast square root" trick was from Carmack about a contractor's code that was speeding things up.

Getting even more meta on it, they had amazing dev tools at their disposal that many other programmers just couldn't afford. Look at the recreations folks do nowadays using pico8 and friends. Some folks get some really amazing tricks running in that field.

None of which is to say Carmack is a bad dev. Quite the contrary, he is quite good. But don't discount the role of everything else to the early success that Doom and friends had. In particular, the artistic execution and vision of everyone else was probably worth more than you'd consider.

I think it's a mistake to conceive of the difference as one between the tortoise and the hare, where the tortoise gets there, eventually. There are bits of this code that the tortoise just wouldn't ever end up producing if you gave them all the time in the world.

https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

How many developers do you know that would bang out a spelling corrector on a single plane flight, in half a page of code?

It's a question of knowing the algorithms of tools that make things possible that other developers might not even consider, and how to express those ideas cleanly and concisely, evaluate your solution, and iterate and improve quickly.

And then consider the quality of his documentation and considerations for improvement and future work.

I remember someone laughing at the idea of 10x programmers. I asked him where he hired from and what's the compensation like. Turns out two high performers I had recently hired were from the same college he was trying to hire from. Of course, he had no chances of attracting anyone since my offer was ~3x what he was offering!

Because we're programmers, we chose an empirical measurement ("10x") as our term for high skill. This terminology is confusing and stupid, but now we're stuck with it

Exactly. There are many modes of that, and you named a few examples. Another example, company has 2 systems maintained by 10 people each. Someone comes in and figures out how to generalize one of the systems to both cases, so they free up 10 of those programmers to go do something else.

Or - 10 people are beating their head on a problem for months, someone comes along and says "it might be OK if we don't solve that problem, let's move on"

Or - someone figures out that a system/module doesn't need to be written because an out-of-the-box solution exists.

Like, I am not a 10X programmer in the sense that I can write 10X the code of the next guy. But have I prevented 10-people's-worth of wasted effort in my career? Yeah...

>You think John Carmack was the only one trying to make 3d games when Doom came out? Thousands of programmers where trying to.

Yes Doom was a great game, and well programmed, but it didn't really move the state of the art forward massively, as I would argue that hundreds of programmers had already written and published 3d games by that point.

Just to be proud and gain that dopamine?

Continuing with this analogy and using Kuhn's concepts, maybe it's better to bracket out breakthroughs (paradigm shifts) when talking about everyday productivity (normal science).

We all know people who code faster than the rest of the team but they always cut corners. Part of the reason that everyone else is slower is because they're trying to work around the under-tested tightly coupled mess left behind by the 10x guy.

Then there's the 10x complexity discussed in the parent comment. Plenty of people will take years to solve a problem, if at all, that someone else would manage in a month. However this may be reversed for a different problem since it depends on experience and predisposition, so it makes no sense to talk about a '10x engineer' in this regard.

I share the conclusion with the OP that it's a vague and ultimately useless distinction.

If your development needs are mundane crud stuff, you don't need a "10x programmer". If you're doing tricky stuff, on the other hand, you absolutely do.

I looked at one of the problems of the final round, looked at the solution, read it for hours, and I couldn't implement it correctly.

Then, there are these top 3 who came up with their own solution and wrote correct code within 20 minutes.

For comparison, I can consistently be in the top 1000 of Google codejam. So, I consider myself a fairly good coder.

I experienced this with topcoder as well. There are some people who are way too smart.

10x programmers and engineers are very much real. It is just rare.

but the reflex for humans is to fear and be angry (understandably, but a bad reflex)

The benefit of talented engineers comes from the fact that they avoid costly pitfalls - not that they pump out more code per hour worked.

I feel this "10x programmers are a myth" attitude comes from a good place of wanting to promote harmonious working and skill-up junior engineers, but it seems so totally detached from reality. I'm not sure the "benefit" of propagandizing against talented assholes is worth the cost of demotivating people who might be inspired that they could become a 10x engineer.

Yes but I think the underlying issue is that some people really Really don't like to acknowledge (or are unaware) there's a small set of elite programmers that can do things average coders can't. But any label we use to describe them (i.e. "10x", "rockstar", "ninja", etc) will be psychologically distasteful. I previously commented about that effect:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13753178

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24753594

To see that hidden psychology driving the narrative... look at how the author constructed his comparison with extra qualifiers of "competent" & "similarly experienced" : ">The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly."

In other words, if we artificially construct the comparison by a priori assuming both programmers are equal, then the 10x difference is a myth. Well yes, that's tautology. If you invent a sentence to "prove" a point, you can set any conditions in the artificial universe in your favor that seems to support it.

However in the real world, the stack of resumes will have a candidates with wildly different skill levels. Some struggle with Fizz Buzz. Some can write a 3d game from scratch. But it's impossible to create a label to describe that wide gap which also doesn't invite bikeshedding on that label.

EDIT reply to: >"Why can't we call them master programmers?"

Because we'd still have endless bikeshedding of the label "master" as in "Master programmers are a myth..."

The first one was not a bad person by any means, but had no social skills, no ability to communicate and often just forged ahead building great stuff on his own. Entire areas of the software were entirely conceived and created by him, and it was difficult to even grasp what he was doing while pair programming with him. In a day he would write more tests and get more coverage than the rest of us would create in a week.

The second one had come from a FAANG-ish place where he was extremely successful, but didn't want the money or stress. He was extremely kind, considerate and great at communicating. Pair programming with him was a joy and he helped everyone else on the team grow. I'm confident he could have created entire regions of the software on his own, but he knew that wasn't the right thing to do. He would often ask questions until someone else on the team could solve a problem, even though I'm sure he knew how to solve it easily himself.

Both qualitatively and quantitatively, their output is at least 10x of a typical developer at a typical company, not even counting everything these people do besides writing code. Many more are not famous but are in the same league of impact/productivity - I'm genuinely puzzled how someone can say such people do not exist.

* Documentation

* The debugger / print()

Becoming a 10x developer means that you have a set of skills that work well together in an end to end process from going to initial requirements to fully fledged architecture and/or code.

> The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly.

Over such short time scales, maybe, but the idea that someone could contribute in 1 year what another programmer wouldn't accomplish in 10 years is highly plausible, to me.

Someone who can sit down and start coding in an ambiguous environment, period, can easily make 10x more value themselves, and allow others to go from .1x to 1-5x merely by being able to pick somewhere to start and just doing it, which allows everyone else to break their own ‘freeze’ and start engaging as now there is something concrete that breaks the locked up state they were in.

I’ve done it a few times, and seen others do it to. It’s magic going from ‘everyone rehashing things on a whiteboard for the 10th time’ to ‘everyone working on the next iteration’

Even worse than super-subjective, it seems like people don't agree on the definition of "10x programmer".

Is that 10x value (code * code quality) produced per unit of work-time? Per brain cycle? Are you controlling for programmer experience, or domain knowledge, as [1] pointed out? Do you actually mean 10x, or is that a stand-in for "significantly more productive" with an unknown value? Do you include collaborative skills and working with a team, or even entirely base your definition off of that?

I'm both curious as to the exact definition you have in mind, and also trying to point out the more general issue so that others arguing past each other can realize that they have two different ideas in mind.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797923

IMO that attitude never makes sense - it can make sense to avoid certain mistakes at all costs (self-driving car), but it never makes sense to try to avoid blame for them (company refuses to admit their car isn't good enough).

This is a problem of culture, not individuals.

Does the culture at a company openly admit mistakes, try to learn from them, and put systemic fixes in place to address them, or do they punish people for mistakes?

If the latter, you end up with nobody admitting to mistakes and a terrible culture, it's not about the people, it's about the situation you have put them in and the incentives given to them.

I'm living this at the moment and it's driving me crazy.

- NPM/Yarn/Gems etc is a disaster waiting to happen. Having lots of dependencies is a security nightmare and a maintenance issue. As these projects get dropped by their original maintainers we'll start seeing more supply-side attacks and more vulnerabilities going unpatched.

- Docker is a great solution for a specific problem. But I don't think it needs to be used for everything. Same for K8s. Same for microservices architecture.

- Simplicity is an important design goal for all systems. Complexity breeds bugs. Boilerplate is simple. DRY can be taken too far. Every abstraction layer leaks at least a little. "clever" code is usually not what is needed for reliable software.

I expect to get downvoted because these are unpopular opinions. But I'm used to arguing about them. It's always interesting to discuss.

Just this year I was working with another team that wanted to move to an architecture that I thought was overengineered for their specific problems. They shared with me an article about some company that was using it. I explained my experiences with such a pattern and where the pitfalls were, hoping their lead dev would think about it or discuss the pros and cons. Well, it was met with silence. They went ahead with their plan anyway.

Too many times that’s happened in the work world, so at least now I don’t invest a lot of effort into changing minds. Best advice

I’ve learned these last few years is don’t tie yourself to your work. If you’re opinionated about how to do things because you love designing software, that’s great, but you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed by how things really get done.

There are times for both speaking and listening in our careers; as I've progressed further in my career I have felt it is often more valuable to exercise active listening.

After couple of years people realize that just having opinion and being vocal about it does not make one a Senior/Manager/Leader. There is much more to it and one learns about it on the job.

Senior dev: This won't work but it's no use explaning why since they've made up their minds (as have I).

I feel that if I present what I think we should do, and why I think it's the best alternative, I shouldn't have to get into a shouting match or even a debate. I don't take it personally if people disagree with me.

If I've got the best ideas and my managers are ignoring them for the loudest ideas, that's on them, not me.

As always the wise approach is probably somewhere in the middle, in this case choosing your battles. You don't have to voice every opinion, but you shouldn't be silent if you have a strong and well-formed opinion about something important.

I’ve worked with too many people who think that their opinions are their identity and defended them as such. A difference of opinions shouldn’t become an excuse to go to war with your coworkers or argue endlessly instead of getting things done.

One of my worst work experiences was with a team of developers who were old friends from a college debate team. We could never have any productive discussions because they entered every conversation intent on winning instead of having an honest, productive conversation.

The best engineers I’ve worked with have had strong opinions but have also been happy and willing to go a different way if that’s what the team decides as a whole.

They’re so accustomed to those things being signs of assholes, or reasons to feel inadequate, that they resist looking at what’s being delivered.

The OP’s point about bracing for a long battle means that truly persuading others is not just about making the amazing thing. It’s about having the humility to weather their resistance and care harder than they do about the merits of the way. And patiently, tenaciously demonstrating the value instead of doing anything that seems like boasting about it. Then they’ll stop ignoring you, and you’ll both win.

To add to what another poster said, it's not jealousy.

Big companies move slow because generally, to get big, they had to be successful (to some extent) and changing too much all at once is a risk that the bureaucracy isn't always comfortable with.

One of my old managers (I work in "enterprise") used to say things like "the efficiencies that this solution will bring the company..." which was just a euphemism for more folks getting laid-off (happened all the time, and glassdoor was full of warnings about this) or more jobs being shipped to our offshore units or even down-sizing in our offshore units.

I think it's reasonable, at least in the US, where healthcare & retirement & welfare is so tightly coupled with employment, for folks in big companies to be wary of innovation. They might want their job to be easier, sure, but too easy and they could be out of a job (for example, if the workload that previously took 5 people can now be managed by 2 or 3).

We're building software for people.

Just curious, how do you know that (a) you failed in HR (b) that it was this question and (c) for this reason?

I ask because it's unlikely that this was literally the feedback given you. Also, "I work too hard" does sound a bit canned.

>> The technical interviews, 6 of them in a row!, felt more like they were wanting to see me fail spectacularly rather than focus on my approach of solving whiteboard problems.

I do think this is more "in your head" that real. Nobody shows up to an interview wanting the other person to fail, but "how they solve whiteboard problems" isn't the goal either. It's more about - how does the person, think, collaborate, make tradeoffs and drives to an outcome - the goal being specifically to translate that outside the whiteboard space.

Ironically it was his honesty in that interview that won me over. For a junior role I'd rather than a rough diamond who I can shape than someone who already thinks they're perfect. And he turned out to be an incredibly good hire too.

Despite being a hiring manager for many years, I still dread getting asked this question myself. It is easily my least favourite interview question. Even the "Explain an occasion when you disagreed with your manager" question is much more favourable than being asking "what is your worst quality".

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.

Nope. Just because it says so in a book doesn't make it true. When you make a statement of the form "X does not exist", a single counter-example is sufficient to prove you wrong. Lucky for me, many such counter-examples exist, and many have even been discussed in this thread. I'll add one to the list: tourist (Gennady Korotkevich). He's a competitive coder that's several orders of magnitude (e.g. 1000x) better at coding competitions than the average competitor. And the average competitor is a few orders of magnitude better than the average professional programmer who doesn't have algorithm experience. All of this is measurable (at most we can quibble about whether the skill differences are 100x or 10000x or infinite). If you don't believe me, please go and take a simulated Codeforces competition right now and see how long it will take you to solve some set of problems that tourist solved in under 2 hours (or if you will be able to solve them at all - I certainly won't be able to solve the hardest Codeforces div1 problems no matter how much time I put in).

I have a feeling this mountain of empirical evidence was insufficient to change your mind about this. I would appreciate if you could take the time to explain why? Why is this evidence not enough?

Ironically enough your example is flawed: there are documented 10x touch-typists.

The realities of the court system place high demands on the typists; the minimum required typing speed is already quite high: trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively[1] - and some exceed the minimum and go for 300 wpm. Even better, the official record for American English [is] 375 wpm [2].

Compare that to the average typing speeds around 30 - 40 wpm [3] Granted, the court reporters use specialized input devices (stenotypes) - but hey, the same can be said about highly productive programmers, who use specialized development environments - and sometimes also specialized input devices.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype

[2] ibid.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_typing#Speed