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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

I agree with a lot of the points, but..

> Most of the 10x factor is most likely explained by team and company factors (process, tech stack, etc) and applies to everyone in the team/company. Intra-team variation is thus much smaller than 10x (even controlling for the fact that companies tend to attract people of equal caliber). Nature vs nurture…

Definitely not true! I have been in companies where 1 engineer outperformed 10 others with everything else being the same and on the same team. It was really obvious too. It does happen. eg, he could handle 10 bug or feature requests in the same time it took some of the other engineers to handle 1.

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>Definitely not true! I have been in companies where 1 engineer outperformed 10 others with everything else being the same and on the same team. It was really obvious too. It does happen.

I believe 2x, 3x maybe 4x but 10x seems far fetched. Are you normalizing for hours worked in your appraisal of performance?

Per the arguments laid out in Peopleware I am opposed to my team members working more than 45-50 hours a week outside of rare crunch times.

No, same hours worked. Often far less hours worked and more accomplished!

I've seen some people read through a bug report and have the area found and fixed in a couple of minutes, and the bug passing QA first time.

I've seen other people take almost the whole day just to track down that same bug in the code, let alone fix it or get it past QA. By that time, the first guy had finished a whole stream of other tasks.

10x definitely exists - hop around a few companies and you'll come across one pretty quick. They are rare, but easy enough to find if you've been through a few startups.

Maybe its just that I look around and I am more willing to label a poor performer a .25x coder, than I am someone who can really crank it out a 10x.

I think the x-factor we are talking about is too abstract to really have meaning. For example, besides speed, my x-factor takes into account things like test coverage, maintainability, code performance, etc. When you make it very multi-dimensional it tends to even people out as folks often have very different strengths and weaknesses.

Sounds like a case for specializing your developers into parts of the process that they are most proficient in.

However, I have seen developers who are incredible in all of those aspects and simply run rings around regular good developers. People who you can give a problem and they've already designed a fairly novel algorithm for best case complexity in 15 minutes to handle it. These people exist and they are not 1x developers, unless creating novel mathematical proofs in 15 minutes counts as 1x ....

Of course it happens, few things are written in stone

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