Becoming a 10x Developer (2018)

Well like others said, this reads more like an opinionated piece on how to be a good teammate.<p>I think Antirez[1] has more practical advice on how to actually become a &quot;10x programmer&quot;<p>Key points:<p>* Experience: pattern matching<p>* Knowledge: some theory is going to help<p>* Low level: understanding the machine<p>* Debugging skills<p>* Perfectionism, or how to kill your productivity and bias your designs<p>* Design sacrifice: killing 5% to get 90%<p>* Simplicity<p>* Focus: actual time VS hypothetical time<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;112" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;112</a>

&gt; Teams that work well together can outperform groups of people who are collectively more talented because there is a multiplication factor for teamwork.<p>There&#x27;s some great advice here about building a team culture that allows everyone to level-up and contribute their best. Some comments here have suggested that this isn&#x27;t what 10x means but that&#x27;s the point! What if we value the wrong kinds of people in our teams - the talented jerks? We should instead call out the value of those that help the whole team improve.<p>On top of the productivity gains, the value of building a culture like this is invaluable for a startup or team with a long-term vision. It builds a sense of camaraderie and environment for learning and growth that draws people in and keeps them around for a long time.<p>Jessica Livingston shares on the role she played in founding YC and building the culture. She points out some of the same kinds of ideas in one of her talks[1] showing that some of the soft skills and the social environment that founders build are way more important than they often realise.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8d-cApFHjeY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8d-cApFHjeY</a>

&gt; Invite discussion with your language by using words like “I think” and “maybe”. (I call this conversational style: &quot;Maybe you should talk more like a woman?&quot;)<p>Aside from the fact that I did not understand that &quot;talk like a woman&quot; thing, is the author advising us to stop the long-running advice of &quot;speak precisely&quot; with &quot;say anything, even if you are not sure&#x27; with the only caveat being to let people know when you aren&#x27;t certain of something?<p>That&#x27;s like a public speaker telling me to say &quot;uuhh...&quot; in between my phrases!

Here are some serious outstanding problems in software:<p>* Considering how fast modern computers are, software is so damn slow.<p>* Software frequently stops working. When it does, the process to diagnose the bug and fix it conclusively is not a straightforward one.<p>* Software is poorly understood. Most developers today work with other people’s abstractions. It’s rare to find a software system that someone can describe the inner workings of end to end.<p>* Software is excessively complex. To understand a codebase, you might have to crawl through ten layers of dependencies, imports, and scaffolding before finding code that actually does anything.<p>These are just some obvious ones off the top of my head. Does following the advice on this list make me any better at tackling any of these problems?<p>Could someone conceivably do <i>none of the things on this list</i>, and still be a very skilled developer who makes strong strides toward solving these problems?

Excerpts:<p>&quot;1. Create an environment of psychological safety&quot;<p>&quot;6. Hold yourself and others accountable&quot;<p>Now, not to get all lawyerly (I am not a lawyer) or anything, but...<p><i>How exactly do you do #1 if it conflicts with #6?</i><p>?<p>And...<p><i>How exactly do you do #6 if it conflicts with #1?</i><p>?

However overused, the phrase <i>10x developer</i> does have a fairly specific meaning, and this isn&#x27;t it.

Discussed at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17304619" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17304619</a>

Every developer should do all of these things, the behavior and norms described in this blog post seem like the absolute minimum to have a healthy work environment.

I know a &gt;250x programmer. That is strictly objective: on a 500-engineer 6-month death-march project, fully half the code delivered was his. He knows somebody who he estimates at 10x his own rate, and who wears out 2 keyboards a year (or did, 20 years ago).<p>(You might object that this makes him a 500x programmer, but he doesn&#x27;t agree: a fair bit of code was written that did not end up in the product, an unknown fraction of which was good.)

And I thought being a 10x developer meant cranking out high quality code..