Having no open source projects to show off = nothing special.<p>Having projects to show off = something that makes you stand out.<p>There's no way around this. I can understand why people haven't got open source projects to their name and that's fine but that doesn't change the fact that those that do will look better in interviews.
The summary of the issue by gnat at <a href="http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good.." rel="nofollow">http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...</a>. is quite good. I find McConnell's argument on "10x" (as a shorthand for "4x-20x") more defensible, and distrust the modality argument made by Bossavit, though Bossavit has additional reasons for why 10x is inappropriate.<p>Unless there's been new research in the last 4 years or so, I don't think there's anything more to say about this topic than what those two have written.
I do agree with the author that a 10x environment is required for a 10x programmer.<p>I was a 4x-5x programmer at my last position relative to my co-workers. However, I was fired after I tried to take my government legislated vacation entitlement after 3 months notice (and after the employer lost the right to dictate when I could take the vacation). The threat of firing also came with a promotion without additional pay. Bureaucracy, & labour violations in the pursuit of profit has created a <1x environment.<p>Mine is somewhat of an extreme case, but anyone will lose any motivation to outperform without commensurate pay/recognition.
Oh wait, a recruiting firm is dissing the data which makes recruiting firms less useful? I am not surprised.<p>Sadly one of the most influential things I've found on how successful a developer will be at a company is how they like to interact at work and how the folks at work prefer to interact. And that is something recruiters can't search for.
Environment and culture certainly play a big role in developer productivity. You can do a lot with average.<p>That being said in any kind of large organisation changing the culture is 100x harder and slower than hiring better developers.<p>IMO, building/creating 10x programmers in your area of business is simple but it is not easy.<p>- Ensure at least 25% of your developers times are spent on learning and development.<p>- Give them the freedom to work on what they think are the most important tasks to the business (e.g. Something similar to open allocation)<p>- Ensure you are paying your developers at least market+20% in order to minimise turnover so you actually get something out of creating 10x'ers.<p>Now go and try and change a large organisations culture to be like the above. I'll wait.... And wait... And wait
"Productivity" is the wrong metric to measure for developers anyway. Development is not a factory job, developers aren't cranking out widgets on an assembly line and developers who crank out more widgets aren't somehow superior to those who crank out fewer.<p>What matters is the value of what devs have created, and that's almost impossible to measure objectively in many cases, with some occasional exceptions. That often takes a lot of work and usually requires someone who is also highly skilled making a subjective judgment. I complete agree with the author here, hiring and culture is hard, and most of the time that fact is ignored and the result is failures on both counts. Taking the time and effort to be good at either is usually a huge competitive advantage.<p>It's similar to software. Does your product solve easy problems or hard problems? If you only solve easy problems, how do you expect that to keep you ahead of the competition? Determining the talent of a developer is not an easy problem in the general case, and if you only hire the developers that are easy to hire you're probably doing it wrong.
Who is "codequalified.com" and why should I listen to him?<p>There's no author name on the post, in fact there's no name on the entire site. Even the Domain is registered anonymously (DomainsByProxy).<p>I don't care for names anyway, but there's no links to any external identity or previous work either.<p>All I see is an anonymous PR blog, seemingly trying to stir some random internet controversy for backlinks.
>Yes, relative skill and productivity between programmers can vary wildly, but I would posit that most of the difference you see between organisations ability to deliver software has nothing to do with how many “10X developers” you have hired and everything to do with culture.<p>That doesn't jibe with my experience at all.
People asking for code samples from me run up against the NDAs that I've worked under (code never to be seen by anyone else) or that I don't really care about the code that I write for me and don't bother storing it on github.
The article basically died after saying stuff like:<p>>Spring Framework is undoubtedly one of the most popular software libraries/frameworks in the history of mankind, yet it is an abominable bag of fail and poor engineering.<p>Typically when you say something like that, you'd actually know what you are talking about enough to state concisely and easily your reasoning.