I think folks’ general understanding of the 10x engineer is that “some people have it and some don’t”.<p>I think it’s more like “I’m working on a bunch of stuff I already know, I have all the designs and business logic clearly identified, and my colleagues and I are all on the same page about how to work together so I’m really productive” vs “this codebase I just adopted is completely unreadable, the designs change every 3 days and the other teams I’m interacting with are adversarial”.<p>People aren’t 10x engineers, situations are.
This all sounds a lot like ADHD:<p>> <i>I stumble on a problem like this one and I stay up late every night until I find the solution. I wake up early each morning with new ideas of things to try. I don’t take enough breaks, but when I do, they’re tactically-designed to exploit my brain’s asynchronous processor to generate solutions for whatever I’m currently stuck on. I irresponsibly defer responsibilities from other areas of my life. Eventually, I realize I’m only at the 20% mark and that a pattern is repeating where a month or more of my life is about to disappear from the calendar. Towards the end, I find myself rushing to find the maze’s exit because my desire to unlock the puzzle’s final secret starts to be overtaken by the shame of all the other balls I’m dropping. It’s excruciating as I approach that inflection point—as intense as an overbearing manager’s “do or die” deadlines ever were, except in this case the pressure I feel is entirely self-imposed.</i><p>> <i>I ruminate endlessly under stress, so I wrest back some control by manufacturing stress responses over things I’m building to trick my brain into ruminating on work that’s useful to me.</i><p>> <i>I’m a terrible listener and struggle with auditory processing,</i><p>> <i>Parsing others’ sentences often feels like I’m filling in the blanks to make sense of them,</i><p>> <i>I’m a really bad learner—disinterested, distractible, and disagreeable. I’ve never enjoyed learning and generally avoid it, especially learning for its own sake. At the slightest discomfort when struggling to understand something, I’ll grasp for any distraction that might offer me a momentary escape.</i><p>I don't see any mention of ADHD in the post, so I think I should say: if the author happens to read this, please consider speaking to your doctor and seeking an assessment.<p>Treatment can be massively beneficial to your quality of life.
Ending?<p>Just that generation is moving on. There have been ardent programmers with each new generation that learns computers, I remember well people who could produce massive amounts of code quickly back in the 1980s. It was a different software environment then, but the enthusiasm was the same.<p>It used to be that amateur programmers created a lot of new products and services that way, before corporations started stifling everything on the Internet. There wasn't always a way to monetize writing projects like that, but that was okay back then, when it wasn't just the size or ubiquity of something you made that caused it to be seen as a great thing.<p>This article is just another case of someone not being able to see beyond their own world, who believes they are singular and unique. The truth is that there is nothing new under the sun.
I’m not sure what I even read here. This discussion doesn’t even mention anything about the realities of being a developer now. It seems to assume the modern workplace gives plenty of space for actual programming when it’s anything but the sort. The author should feel lucky they apparently get to program 40 hours a week in the first place.
Reads like an attention seeking rant, anecdotal and full of personal biases.<p>Useful as a data point of the state of mind of an technical person of some experience, a certain life journey etc. But what else to conclude?<p>Software clearly has changed quite a bit in the past decades, but arguably quite a bit less than hardware and probably not measurably enough to require a different mental wiring from developers.<p>What <i>has</i> changed massively is the economics of the tech industry. But that is a different story.
It's not that the enthusiasts are disappearing—they're just harder to find now that the financial incentives for choosing software are so strong. The culture will not be defined by them nearly as much as before, but if anything I suspect that will just make the 10x effect even more apparent by contrast. It's hard to beat the depth of skill you develop when you have a single subject that's defined your life from the age of 10, and there are still plenty of budding developers out there who meet that description.
I think the author is wrong about the demise of the 10x programmer, they are just going to look different. But the author identified many of the attributes they’ll still have- tenacity, tirelessness, and thoroughness. Also an insatiable curiosity.<p>The best example of a 10x programmer I know went to art school. He’s a UX architect and can produce functional prototypes faster than you can describe what you want. He has all the attributes mentioned by the author, but I’m pretty sure he spent at least sometime being an enthusiast in things other than computers. Today though? He soaks up information about everything related to html, css, and JavaScript and turns it into beautiful interfaces.<p>The author is right that cultural influences in the late 70s, 80s and 90s resulted fairly specific archetype being in prevalent in the industry. To be too interested in computers had social consequences. Being a “nerd” was a real label and sub group that ended up being both excluded and exclusive. It was hard to be casually into computers like you can be casually in to sports, except perhaps video gaming.<p>There are plenty of people who have entered the profession now that’s been normalized that see everything as just a job, but there are also many that come in and get bit by the same bug that seized the kids who got into computers in the 80s and 90s- the magic of the machine, the beauty of code, the thrill of getting something to work.<p>I’ve had the privilege of working with and even mentoring people like this- people who discovered programming relatively late from non-traditional backgrounds but none the less have become extremely competent coders. They look different, they approach some problems different, but they are just as tenacious, tireless, through, and curious as I am. And just as productive, too.
I don't know. I was born in 1980 and first got into programming as a young kid on an 8-bit Apple ][, and basically kept tinkering and coding through successive generations of computers as they became available. No stackoverflow or online tutorials - just books, magazines, and trial-and-error until the light bulb finally went off and you suddenly grokked pointers :)<p>I started interacting with other like-minded nerds via local BBSes, and first experienced the internet through a dial-up UNIX shell account from a local ISP.<p>Computers today are great - but you can do quite a bit of programming without understanding how anything really works. Will programmers who grew up with 64-bit machines, GUIs, always-on internet connections and <i>very</i> high-level programming languages be as good as the 80s kids?<p>Who knows? Do they even need to be? Most technology companies don't seem to think so based on their hiring practices.
> I stumble on a problem like this one and I stay up late every night until I find the solution. I wake up early each morning with new ideas of things to try. I don’t take enough breaks, but when I do, they’re tactically-designed to exploit my brain’s asynchronous processor to generate solutions for whatever I’m currently stuck on. I irresponsibly defer responsibilities from other areas of my life. (…)<p>That’s not enthusiasm. That’s workaholism.
Every generation credits itself with some form of unattainable stoicism and yet progress marches on. I have no problem believing in 10x developers, but in my experience it’s always been down to hard won knowledge of the right architectures, libraries, data structures and algorithms. This helps to reduce suboptimal design and rework, allowing one to make constant, confident progress. It’s no wonder that older, more experienced devs often have this knowledge, but it’s not impossible, nor even very rare, for current and future generations to acquire it (even during their much-maligned Computer Science degrees).
The supply of passionate, engaged, "craftsman" developers is not zero-sum. People can be <i>inspired</i> to take their relationship with their work to a higher level of emotional engagement.<p>No, this does not require people to develop on side-projects, outside of work (something that is nigh impossible to request from people with other demands on their time, such as academic degrees or newborn children). Neither is such emotional engagement necessarily evidence of a "10x" engineer.<p>The simple fact of the matter is that Product does not work with code, does not understand code, and will not appreciate the complexities of working with code unless •Engineering stands up for its own interests<i>. You </i>can* inspire Juniors to understand more about their interests, care more about their craft, and lead them on a path to being happier with their career choice more generally. That only happens if you decide to engage with them, mentor them, and give them time to self-develop.
I teach CS at a state university. Anecdotally, I still see the hardcore enthusiasts, maybe 5-10% of the class.<p>Seems down from when I was in college, but my memory of the 90s is getting hazy. :)
Another way to look at this is that programming as a job has been made manageable. That's in the sense of being controllable by management. "Agile" is all about that. Manufacturing went through this between about 1910 to 1980, replacing craftsmanship with mediocre workers under direct supervision.<p>I sometimes deride "webcrap" on here. The point I'm making is that much of web-related programming today is bolting together off the shelf parts with a bit of custom glue.
Programming has become wider but more shallow as a result. It's necessary to know about, or be able to look up, a huge array of parts. It's usually not necessary to understand how they work inside. Between Stack Overflow and Google, you can usually look it up.<p>Who has a well-thumbed copy of Knuth immediately at hand any more? I once did, but those books are in the garage now.
I had a similar experience as the OP (but I never was anything close to the 10x developer) but in my case, I recovered my passion for programming, but in different ways.<p>Back in the day in 2005-2014 I got inspired by several folks around the world and looking back there are some characteristics of all those folks (i) they had a great sense of craftsmanship, (ii) they had a certain level of autonomy to build and they were "listened" in some of the engineering decisions, and (iii) most of those folks are shielded against meta-work (e.g. corporate bloat meetings, bureaucracy, low-value processes/corporate rituals, etc) because they were doing something special that talks with the customers/clients to understand them to build something meaningful.<p>In my experience, unfortunately, the (ii) and (iii) are the norm and the end product is the vanishing of the (i).<p>The software development profession changed with more tools accessible to more people, lots of people have access to the SOTA in code generation/assistance, and we had things unthinkable for our predecessors like version control systems, CI/CD, infrastructure as a code, containers and so on, but most of the corporate developers like me are constrained by the environment where not only we have that corporate iron ball on the foot, but we're every day more distant from the clients/customers.<p>I used to be frustrated due to that, and I ended up fired twice because I naively fought against it, but at the end of the day I channel my craft into my hobby/pet projects or when I do something for my family (for instance, I was using a small script to automatic schedule Hemodialysis for a cousin that has a kidney problem).
This is an article flopping its way around the central point - why is there a 10x demise?<p>He doesn't answer the question. Instead, we have some nonsense about his past impulsive habits, quibbles about lack of diversity, gender imbalance, "Inter-generational conflict is brewing", 'privileged white man', and other drivel. What a waste of time as an article.
I think the work flow that we have adapted is not something that encourages the long term general solutions. We all have feature to deliver every two weeks. We are being monitored every day in terms of tickets being moved and commits being done. (Thank you jellyfish)<p>It seems like the actual value is measured wrong in corporate environment and it does not enable focused long term plans and solutions.<p>I have a friend who negated 8 full Java classes with 50 lines of SQL. But, he did it without telling the management cause if did, then he would have to answer to them everyday. And he was learning his way and experimenting and changing all over the place. I don't thinking deeply about problems for creating better solutions is appreciated or even recognized. And it takes time to learn solving problems that way.<p>Not attributing this to the corporate environment completely, but if you only care about features and its delivery ASAP, well... you will get them ASAP inspite of what horrors lurks under the hood.
I think the general thesis of the article is misplaced. The "enthusiast" archetype is not limited to profession and historical context. There will always be "enthusiasts" (intrinsically motivated people) in every profession at any point in time and it is highly unlikely that will change. Sure, we can describe a reality where programmers at a historical point in time had different traits but I'm not convinced the argument adds any value or the traits described in the article accurately describe the generational dynamics. Software is messy just like reality. Attitudes and ideas will change but there will always be people who are more interested in any topic. I think a more realistic description is "things have changed but some people are still obsessive about software and problem solving and that will never change".
Sure, we don't have computers hooked to TVs and tape recorders anymore. But we have other entry points to programming, which are as addictive. More often than not, it's people who were exposed to programming at a young age, and found an endless source of comfort, joy, escape.<p>Some teenagers get that early exposure, and some find it's a nice place for them. I give some of my time as The Grey Beard to help the local community robotics club at the local fablab : Arduino, BBC micro:bit, laser cutter, electronic components. The magic happened. One boy started to tinker to motorize his skateboard using scavenged parts and duct tape. An other boy got his own BBC micro:bit and went mad with Scratch, spending sleepless nights over it. Now he want to code with actual code and not Scratch blocks.
I would think there are more young
enthusiast programmers today than in say 2000. But supply will still be an issue, there are way more
funded
software ideas than talented people to work on them. Especially now anyone can start their own
company for effectively a negative amount of money.
I think the 10x developer is about providing more value than just pure programming.<p>There are lots of ways a developer can push the needle<p>maybe producing 10x more code,
maybe they develop new features 10x faster and if they are full stack with better UI/UX out of the box.
Maybe they can build an entire MVP from scratch on their own.
Maybe they can handle DevOps too
Maybe they can contribute to product
Maybe they implement security best practices and catch security issues of others
etc<p>It could be one item or a combination, but there are definitely developers that just provide 10x+ more value than a typical developer.<p>Just having one on a team or at a startup especially early on can make a huge difference.
The false dichotomy between "works on weekends for free" and "finds conversation about tools at lunch unbearable" is weird. If you work in a door-making factory, a job presumably very few people are passionate about, you're still going to complain that the number 3 planer is making a rattling noise even though it was just serviced last week.
What most people talking about 10x vs 1x engineers forget is that the last 10-12 years of VC-pumped software engineering has created an insane amount of 10x engineers not because they're better, faster or more intelligent, but just because they're people that care about their job, even if it's boring, and they deliver quality at a constant pace.
As a 0.01X developer I feel entitled to just ask the questions, I shouldn't attempt to answer them, that would be silly.<p>Why is the software never finished? Why does stuff stop working after a while?<p>Sounds like a lame thing to ask and I know enough of the answers to make it rhetorical.... but this isn't the only sector building things. We build a ton of stuff! The last few decades others are rushing out products too and they are as cheap as they are crappy but it wasn't always like that. Most things are actually good for a good while.<p>If you boot up the museum quality computer from back in the days, insert the floppy... woah everything just works!?<p>programming is just variables, if statements, for loops and function calls. Nothing new happened. The web browser was the last good idea.<p>Hardware is insanely fast, but everything runs slow? What productivity did we gain if we have to endlessly rewrite everything? (think: Newspeak 11th edition)<p>Project tool chain, project programming language and project package manager should have been finished by now?<p>Imagine it to be a race against mr fusion[0] and the flying cars[1].<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/ecatthenewfire" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.twitch.tv/ecatthenewfire</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://www.pal-v.com/en/explore-pal-v" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.pal-v.com/en/explore-pal-v</a>
I like how the author explicitly says that 10x programmers were a from a flimsy paper from the 1960's and in the original paper, a 10x programmer was only relative to "the worst programmers" - not to average programmers.<p>I think this generational change will be healthy.
10x is/was a gross concept - <a href="https://1x.engineer/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://1x.engineer/</a> ftw.<p>*Edit - to clarify I meant what it represented, of course some people nX times more effective/efficient/higher output than others.
Sorry for being off topic, but I <i>really</i> find the fluorescent green border obnoxious. Even if I scroll down, it remains at the top and bottom, which I find distracting.
Is this satire? I find it difficult to believe this can be serious. If so, this is a sad example of the "i am very smart" culture that is rampant in tech these days.
On the other hand we see the rise of a few select 1000x developers: those who master the math behind neural networks. Also GPT rises some non developers to developers.
Author rambles about 10x programmers, while basically identifying as one.<p>Not sure what the take away here is other than the author has a high opinion of himself.