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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there are any myths involved, we can name people. Fabrice Bellard leaps to mind. A bunch of the OSS maintainers. These people are just observably (much more than) 10x more productive than the standard developer. People cast from the same mold turn up from time to time in the corporate world too.

Part of it is problem selection, part of it is hard work, some fraction appears to be genius. But it is obvious and observable, I've seen average developers at work and they just won't achieve the results the top performers get even if given 10x as much time.

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It seems utterly obvious that there are 2x and 3x devs; we see them all around us. And there are outliers well above that level of common performance.

The denial by some of the existence of 10x engineers is one of the ongoing baffling mysteries to me.

It's completely opposite to the idea that a person's success in today's capitalism is only luck.

The same reason shows why the bimodal and 'branded' name is such a strange thing to focus on.

Why only 10x? And why not try to make your 1x into 2x?

It's like if sports fans spent all their time talking about a potential player who could deliver exactly 10 times more goals than everyone else. Why is this a topic that needs to be brought up so often? Why have we 'software engineer'-ised the idea that some people are much more important for productivity?

I should clarify that by referring to it as a myth, I'm not denying in my post that there are people who are 10x as productive as most people.

The "myth" is that there was a formal study done and these performers were identified. The reality is that the study was looking at the difference best and worst performers, not best vs average, which is an important clarification.

This has since evolved to a further myth that 10x programmers exist, but are somehow always harmful and should be avoided. There are plenty of articles examining "The 10x programmer myth" which, with no more evidence than the original assertion, put forward that 10x programmers should be avoided.

And here in this article, it gets re-written again, that they aren't even 10x as productive, and just produce ten times as much in terms of LOC but it's all terrible code!

> The reality is that the study was looking at the difference best and worst performers, not best vs average, which is an important clarification.

That is an important, often misunderstood, clarification, but I think it’s also subtly incorrect.

It’s 10x higher than some minimally competent level, not 10x higher than the worst in the field.

I think the original studies (certainly later follow-up studies did this) excluded results from participants who did not complete the assignment at all. That makes some sense from a data analysis convenience standpoint, but truncating the left tail and then saying some are 10x better than the absolute worst (that you truncated in the previous step) isn’t fully representative of what we see in the field.

In any case, people on here tend to be extremely sceptical of social science results, and demand much better standards and reproducibility.

Except that particular 1968 paper, which is held up and treated as gospel, because it helps to confirm rather than challenges their personal experience.

If we are going to demand better, we should do so consistently. Reproducing that result with more rigour would be a useful start.

I group the skepticism that I see around this topic into two buckets.

One is "it's not 10x, but is maybe 4 or 5x"; the other is "if differences exist at all, it's definitely less than 2x".

I get/have sympathy and agreement for the first type on a technically-precise level, but it also doesn't really change any of my behavior as a technologist or people/org leader.

The second type of skepticism I just don't understand at all from people who have worked more than a couple years in industry.

> The reality is that the study was looking at the difference best and worst performers, not best vs average

This is a myth, the worst performers didn't complete the task or delivered a faulty solution, those were removed from the study so you didn't see the worst.

Best to worst would be much much larger than 10x, however finding anything larger than 10x would take a very long time as it means waiting around for the slowest to finish.

Edit: And if you add back all of those worst performers, best vs average would also shift significantly towars 10x.

One explanation of the denial of the existence of 10x developpers I find interesting, but can't remember where I read/heard from, is related to the stakhanovite movement [0].

Basically it's in the 30's in Russia, where a coal miner, Alexei Stakhanov, had a mythic productivity and inspired people to reach that said mythic productivity, as an example. While Stakhanov really existed, it's not factually established that he managed to produce what is claimed.

Same goes for 10x developpers. Is there at least a name for some of them and a concrete example of what they managed to produce ?

That is, I believe, a fairly good explanation.

[0] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

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