Do 10x programmers exist?

chilling on the toilet..

Was is punished and sent back to the toilet for challenging a x10 dev

very unlikely !== impossible

there are so many 0.1x programmers

10x developers exist just write your code in Autoit, no cap sensitivity, no strict variables, Auto variables type designation. I don't use RStudio cus I wrote my own program that does everything RStudio does with Au3 to cloud LAN compute with true multicore asynchronous processing across multiple computers for crunching Ai algorithms that would otherwise take RStudio over a week to calculate, finish calculations in 3 hours. I wrote my own Ai platform from scratch with Au3, in two days without any prebuilt Ai tensorflow libraries. I code any other languages like python 2x slower and other lower level languages relatively slower. 10x developers exist, people are just coding with the wrong language.

I'm a 10x programmer on a good day, in a good company, on a good project.
I'm a 0x programmer on a bad day, in a bad company, on a bad project.


Maximizing productivity is all about pairing the right person for the right project in the right company and giving him the right tools and enough freedom to do his work accordingly.

If you have a department where there is one good developer, two average ones and seven bad ones it can happen. In very big bureaucratic organizations, like government agencies that is often the case.

I am a 0.0010x developer.

I'd guess that at least one in ten developers is an order of magnitude faster than the average. Maybe that order of magnitude is in some base less than ten, but I believe it because everywhere I've been from being a student to the various places I've worked, there have been one or two people that have just been significantly faster than the rest of us. Maybe it's only twice as fast, or three times as fast, but that's still a huge difference.


I don't think it is to do with intelligence, but I do believe it's some sort of talent. In other artistic fields I think it's easy to believe that some artist might be able to render something much faster than an average person, so why not with programming? We probably see it all the time, but just don't realise it. Imagine taking five programmers that you work with and asking them to implement a binary search. Wouldn't you be able to estimate that some would be at least twice as fast and more likely to be correct than others? The industry sets a pretty low bar for average, so the distance between average and the top is pretty big, and the higher order the problem, the bigger the gap.


I also don't think it has anything to do with making things easier for other people. That's a different talent, like the difference between a talented teacher and a talented researcher.


On the other hand, terms like 10x and rock star are just hype words, not intended for taking literally. I think of them as different, where the 10x developer is just fast, and the rock star developer may not even be a good developer, they just sell themselves well to suckers.

While 10x developers may not exist, 0.1x developers certainly do.

I've heard & googled that on average a professional developer writes about 50 productive lines of code per day. In reality I often write 3, 4 times more than that, after thinking & considering various solutions (different Data structures, how to organize the code...)

"10x programmers" produce apparent benefits with hidden costs. Productive programmers produce hidden benefits with apparent costs.