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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

The 10x developer was never supposed to be "churning out code at breakneck speed" or "leave a trail of destruction in their wake", except for maybe some misguided recruiter/manager/CV-padder. Saying that they are is an easy strawman argument since we all agree no one wants those.

When you think 10x developer, you should instead think about devs who built industries, or devs that made such huge impact that them being human has been questioned. Widely known examples might be: John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Joel Spolsky, etc. For industry-specific ones, in JS-land you could think of TJ Holowaychuk or Sindre Sorhus. And for quantifying it a bit from the "business" side, think that Instagram reached 14M users with 3 Engineers and Whatsapp supported 450M users with 35 engineers. For a more general view, "/fast" is a great read: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

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Joel Spolsky more feels like a good dev (median skill) that is really good at writing blog posts.

He had some pioneer ideas about automatic micromanagement by Jira-esque velocity tracking tools. A sin he got way to little critique for.

Carmack is probably the archetype of a 10x dev and like any real diva he seems very toxic to work with. Dunno if you'd want him unless you are writing Doom before 3d games were a thing.

From all his public talks, Carmack seems like a nice and smart guy. I’m curious why you have a negative impression.

It is just the feeling I got from reading his dev. diary. Nothing but a feeling that I don't want to work for him.

Elon Musk seems very timid and shy. I was surprised when watching the "steel ball fail". He was nothing like what I imagined him.

It is really hard to tell people characters by video appearances.

In the book "Masters of doom", at least during the doom era, Carmack seemed like a really bad collegue. Very, very demanding and complete lack of social tact. The book gave the impression that he wanted everyone to be as commited as him, and his commitment was extreme.

Obviously this was a few decades ago.

What did Uncle Bob do, besides being good at marketing?

Teach generations of developers how to make their code better, making the whole industry much better than it'd have been otherwise. A 10x dev IMHO is not only great coding, but makes everyone around them better. Now that said, I'm going to edit to change him for Linus Torvalds, since you are right that he might not be the archetypal 10x dev as he's not famous for his code, but for his writings.

Yes. 10x can also be by being good at explaining things, and raising the ability of everyone around. The 10x also Increases the skill of the entire team.

How long have you been programming? Odds are Martin's been doing it longer. In fact, my understanding is that if you're the average dev, Martin was consulting with companies that found him valuable longer, and developed for longer than that.

I've never understood this insistence some people have on outright refusing to acknowledge someone who wrote a styleguide they disagree with have the ability to turn on a computer. This isn't just in reference to Martin, either, and it's doubly weird because half of them seem to rest on describing style as mostly to entirely subjective in the same breath. It's just a book. Merely don't follow it and it can't hurt you, even if it's somehow "the one wrong preference". It's not going to kill your cat.

Lots of people have been programming for longer than me, that doesn't make them all questionably human 10x developers.

Keep moving those goalposts. It really makes you look like the reasonable side of this conversation.

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