Becoming a 10x Developer

Later on, I got certified as a tournament judge, and worked my way up the ranks, eventually becoming a level 3 (the current highest level; previously, levels 4 and 5 existed but were kind of special roles for level 3 anyway, so they got collapsed back into it a few years ago).

Part of my role was to train and teach other people who wanted to do this. A Magic tournament judge, in the eyes of most players, is just someone you call over when there's a rules question or a dispute in your match. And that is the most visible part of what they do. And level 3 does require expert-level knowledge of the game's rules and tournament policies, and you get tested on that (a long written exam at promotion, and 3-4 refresher/update exams throughout each year).

But being level 3 is about a whole lot more than that; L3s aren't more useful to a tournament because they can answer 10x as many rules questions in the same amount of time (they can't). L3s are useful because they act as multipliers for the other people around them. They've put in the time to learn how to coordinate a team of other officials, keep track of all the logistical things that need to be done to keep a tournament running, delegate as necessary and appropriate, etc.

This is something that I saw over and over at large tournaments; L2s were permitted to lead teams on occasion as a kind of supervised training exercise (under the watchful eye of an L3), and watching them always brought home just how much stuff I'd had to learn to do in order to make that look easy, and to know how to keep a team running smoothly and getting things done throughout the tournament.

But most Magic players don't get that; they still persist in thinking of the higher levels as just "the people who can answer really hard rules questions", when that's a tiny fraction of what's actually going on. Someone who could only answer hard rules questions quickly, without all the other multiplier skills, might be useful as an L2, but never as an L3 (I started out as one of those people, for what it's worth).

And when I needed to explain the level structure in a short way, I'd always say it was about broadening your focus. At level 1, your focus is answering questions and being the go-to person in your local game store. At level 2, your focus broadens to include your entire local community, larger competitive events, and helping to train and give feedback on your colleagues. And at level 3, your focus broadens further: now you're concerned with tournaments of all types (including the professional level), you're at least a regional leader, you're working on helping turn existing L1s into L2s and L2s into L3s, etc.

At a tournament, when things were going well, it sometimes looked like I was doing very little, unless you paid close attention. I'd wander around the floor of a tournament, having conversations with other judges, pausing every so often to pull out my notebook and write something down or cross something off a checklist, and occasionally consult on resolving some situation that had come up. But an air of nonchalance can cover for a lot of things actually going on; those conversations would be me checking in on members of my team, following up on things they'd asked about earlier, making sure they had things to keep them engaged if the tournament was running slow, redistributing people around the tournament floor if there were areas without good coverage, making sure they got their assigned breaks, delegating or re-scheduling things as needed, working down my various checklists.

And by contrast, the times when I looked the busiest were the times when things were badly going wrong.

But I don't see it as bing HELD up as a personal goal. I read it more as IF it is your personal goal.

"Dev skills" are like a sport for some of us. You probably don't get paid to make three pointers on your friends playing basketball on weekends but would you find it so bizarre to work on improving your jump shot?

I was programming well before anyone was paying me to. I was just bored.

This is dangerously wrong. If you work in a team, your ability to work well with others and help others work well with you correlates strongly with both your productivity and the upwards slope of your career path. This is true in almost every profession, and even more so in complex and collaborative work such as software development. Labelling people skills as a manegerial issue is doing yourself a huge disservice.

This article is particularly interesting to me. I know the author - not well, mind you, but we have a few mutual friends and I've spoken with them at conferences. More importantly, I respect them both socially and professionally.

I have to wonder if my impression of the article is colored by this personal knowledge. In turn, that leads me to ask if my impression of other articles is colored by my lack of shared experiences.

For what it's worth, I think it goes both ways. I feel like I'm often seen as part of the "culture in power" in this field, though from my perspective I'm definitely an outside and make a constant conscious effort to moderate my speech.

Features/story points (velocity)? well.. this is a productivity metric of the team rather than individual.

Without a doubt some people can be more "productive" individuals than others, but I -do- think in the real world, it makes more sense to look at productivity on the team level rather than individual. Ex: someone is very productive at making lots of commits but obnoxious to work with or has shoddy tests/documentation that end up sucking time away from the "less productive" developers that have to clean up their mess...