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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

I worked with a guy who everyone thought was 10x, I thought he was shit. This guy and another built all the systems for this company, and a product that was the cash cow. Started in 2005 using struts. Everything they built was struts. They duplicated the entire code base for the next web app. There were like four versions of this thing customized to do different things (ie trivial shit like the web sign up form). These guys couldn't even factor out the data access/service stuff into separate modules for reuse.

When it came time to learn Spring, this guy flailed, and wrote Spring like it was struts. In addition, he was a pontificating jack ass, real abrasive personality.

The non technical and business users thought this guy was a super star. I've only quit a job once because of personalities, and this was that time.

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If he built all the systems and especially the cash cow, isn't that some objective measure that he's more valuable than the average employee?

Maybe he's messy, but nobody pays the janitor millions of dollars to clean up everyone else's messes even if they tell themselves he's important. Rather, they pay the people who made it worth cleaning up the building in the first place.

One issue some programmers have is discerning that not all code has the same value. I think with code it's harder than with physical things to "know where the value is".

It's obvious, for example, that we don't need titanium cupholders in a car, but maybe titanium rods _are_ necessary to achieve a particular level of performance.

But in software, you'll see programmers doing the ethical equivalent of putting in titanium cupholders "because it's the best" or whatever, with no regard to the cost.

In my experience, a 10x programmer is a 1x programmer who knows where the value is and spends their time on that.

Absolutely, I was attempting to illustrate the difference in perspective, and how subjective '10x' is. My comment above fails in this regard.

No. It's not creator-janitor thing. It's rather the situation that programmer A makes a huge technical debt, and programmer B must pay him off.

It's poor code design, poor code management.

It's more like:

- irresponsible house developer builds house very fast and very cheaply but he doesn't care about safety or design

- then building is beginning to collapse and tennants have to hire another developer to fix mistakes of previous developer.

They must pay twice! One time - for creation of the building. Second time - for fixing.

I sometimes feel like the guy you describe (although perhaps because I do indicates that I am not?)

I have a webapp that I maintain for a family member written, by me, in 2005. It was using WebWork (which became Struts 2) and still is, and I am trying to move it to something more modern in bits and pieces. But it's requiring me to learn a lot, which I am trying to do in the limited time I have.

At my work we do way more modern thing, but so much so that I'm not able to do any UI stuff since they use tech I'm not "hit the ground running" capable of doing. But I'm trying.

I hope I'm not abrasive however.

>> This guy and another built all the systems for this company, and a product that was the cash cow.

Anecdotal, of course, but .. I've worked with quite a few 10x guys in my time, none of them liked Java, most of them would consider Java a reason to quit. It's been a while, I would guess some of them would find Scala acceptable.

I know several 10x Java coders. Honestly though 10x should transcend a language...

Why would it? Suddenly having to always look up your standard library's basic functions will slow anyone down.

You can learn stuff like that pretty quick.

10x guys let the tools do the hard work, like IDE to look up standard library's basic functions.

Which language has standard library small enough that people can memorize the whole thing?

JavaScript :) Although I keep forgetting some functions even from JS.

What are the parameters for Date.setFullYear() again? :)

There's no need to turn this into an anti-(fill in the blank) thread.

Please don't.

Java actually allows for 10x work because it's so simple and let's you work quickly.

My experience was that most Java apps have a terrible compilation and startup time. I hated working with Java because of this.

Yes, just think how many throwaway unicorn greenfield projects these Java developers didn't participate in because they absolutely have to insist on maintaining crufty decade old code bases that actually solve a tangible business problem instead of thinking software is an afterthought to a fluffy full page HTML5 marketing video about revolutionizing the world.

At present time, Java8 is acceptable (wit lambdas, RxJava, etc.). But yes, you are right: Spring, Hibernate, JBoss, etc. are huge reason to quit.

My own web projects in java 15 years ago were coded in java and glued by JavaScript (Rhino) with templates in JavaScript, which were compiled into bytecode for speed: fast, secure, simple, 10x faster to code.

You are wrong. 10x guys care about product outcome rather than fretting languages. 10x guys certainly use Java in their toolset.

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