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Comment by samastur | Hacker News Reader

At the beginning of my career I worked in a team of 6 developers. Everyone except me was at least a competent developer. One of us did literally 80% of work. Company was paid by head so it didn't care about productivity of others and our client (HP) was happy.

Hence I know that incredibly productive developers exist, but they are also rare since he was the only one that really qualified in more than 20 years of my career.

Because they are rare I don't care how to test for them as it is very unlikely I'll cross path with any when searching for new team members (not sexy enough work) and just try to focus on finding competent reliable people.

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That's a good point.

The fact is, if you are working for a corporation your salary is mostly dependant on your position and not on your output. Peoples outputs can be orders of magnitude different and they will still be earning roughly similar salaries.

My advice to 10x-ers is: don't work for corporations. If you can be very productive you are selling yourself short.

Agreed on this. If you are a true 10x’er or 100x’er you can do best by making your own company. A year and a half ago I actually did this and recently exited for a good sum. Made a lot more money than if I had kept my salaried position.

The most productive engineers are not only good at coding, but also at identifying market value or customer need, and dealing with others to efficiently build everything required for the business.

>If you are a true 10x’er or 100x’er you can do best by making your own company.

What it takes to be a 10x is not necessarily the same as what it takes to start your own company, imo.

> My advice to 10x-ers is: don't work for corporations. If you can be very productive you are selling yourself short.

I understand the reasoning here, but I think it's worth adding a the caveats that:

1. Running a business and programming (or whatever skill you're an expert in) are two very different skillsets, and you need the former to get the best opportunities.

2. Not everyone finds it fun to run a business or take care of things other than what they're actually passionate about.

It may be worth evaluating whether you'll enjoy these aspects, and acknowledge there's a chance you might prefer working for less in a situation with less stress/responsibilities.

> 1. Running a business and programming (or whatever skill you're an expert in) are two very different skillsets, and you need the former to get the best opportunities.

Sure. But smart developers are also a good material to be smart in other areas of life, if they put themselves to it.

> 2. Not everyone finds it fun to run a business or take care of things other than what they're actually passionate about.

True. One way, old as humanity, is to find a partner who is enthusiastic about doing the things that you dislike. As far as statistics go, startups have higher chance of succeeding with two founders than one, when both founders have complementary skillsets.

I know few like that, had spell myself in my youth. Sadly, you learn in later life, you don't get compensated any more and worse, you set yourself up for burnout. Something I'm aware many did and, dare say, still do. Companies don't care, they'll take your blood but not good at giving it back or, indeed, slowing you down to the rate they pay you. Let alone, compensate for the efficiency (though that may have changed in the last decade or so in some places).

My question is ; if you somehow could level up all the other people on the team to the super productive person's level - how much more productive would the team have been? Clearly it would have been somewhat more productive but I think a lot of this "10x developer" stuff is kind of reductionist - the quality of the overall team being solely the total quality of each individual member.

Sports teams are the obvious analogy here - with football/soccer you sometimes get these "team of the season" things where the best player in each position is chosen. One striker scored 50 goals for his team, another striker scored 48 goals somewhere else - wow, if they played together the team would have 98 goals. Except obviously not since there's a finite number of chances and the team is structured to play a certain way (often around their star player). And that's not taking into account ego/personality clashes which is a non-trivial concern with high performing people.

I think ego/personality clash are not related to performance.

I once worked with a 'prima dona' in the team who couldn't stand when someone critised his (average at most) performance.

You only associates both because it's 'easy' to resolve problems with high ego/low- average performance devs, you fire them.. But when it's an high performance dev, it's more complicated..

It probably depends on the company and project. If it's a hugely ambitious one with tons of challenging tasks to work on, then everyone being '10x times better' would mean it'd speed along and get done in about a quarter of the time.

For most projects/companies? I suspect you probably couldn't get much more efficient if everyone was significantly more skilled, and quickly realise how little meaningful work there is to do there. Given 10 super expert programmers the task of creating another CRUD app or client website and I suspect at least 9 of them would probably quit by the end of the month out of boredom.

I agree, I've found like 1 or 2 "10x" developers in my career. Before I met them I doubted they existed.

I think that's why there's debate about whether they exist. It's a somewhat implausible idea and they're rare enough that plenty of people have never met one.

However if you follow open source stuff at all it's relatively easy to find examples, e.g. in the Rust world Alex Crichton is an absolute machine. Probably a 20x developer.

I find it interesting that this was early career. It lines up with my experience, too.

Perhaps it's the case that, the less you know about a field, the more you attribute success to mysterious personal characteristics. And the more you know about it, the more you understand the role of circumstance and situational dynamics in determining performance.

Good point. My ignorance back then certainly could have played a part in my perception, but I don't think I am wrong :) I could go into details why, but I doubt specifics would be interesting to anyone.

I do agree that personal ignorance can make competency look more amazing.

Added to which, corporate bureaucracy often nullfies your impact anyway.

That 10x potential matters little if the real hard work is tracking down the right person to reconfigure kubernetes or getting sign off to deploy to prod and the code writing is essentially all plumbing.

Same. In our team of 10 there was one guy that did about half the work. Making him literally the 10x (okay, 9x) programmer.

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