I can never let these arguments go. There are steady, consistent, 10x people in EVERY line of work, from flipping burgers to performing neurosurgery. There's a bell curve for any ability, and there are people who are on the far end of it, every time. Sports is the easily-understood example. Why should programming be any different? In my 27 years, I've written and rewritten software that different groups have also written. I don't want to write out all the details, but I've been a quantifiably-10x+ programmer at least 3 times in my career.
Do you have 10x players in sports? No! So it's a good counterexample.
The superstars are incrementaly better and work hard to be extremely consistent at being slightly better. That leads to becomeing a superstar because if you're consistently 0.1% faster than everyone else, you win most of the time. But 10x better? No of course not. It's not humanly possible.
Is the top track and field runner 10x faster than the middle of the pack? No, just a few fractions of a second.
Is Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton 10x faster than the tail end drivers who have to pay to play? Not even close, just a few fractions again and consistently.
Same for every line of work. There just isn't enough spread possible in human capabilities for someone to be 10x better than other professionals in the field.
(Important to note we're comparing to other professionals in the same field, not random people off the street who've never done the activity.)
I think this actually does illustrate how the possibility of 10x [performers] is perfectly valid. To build on your example, while it's true that that Lewis Hamilton isn't driving 10 times faster, he has 103 F1 wins while to the average pro driver has zero. Michael Phelps isn't ten time faster than his competition, but he has 23 Olympic gold medals while the average professional swimmer has zero. It gets a bit more convoluted with the positional team sports, but at a glance there are players in the same position, with the same overall career trajectories, who are earning significantly more than 10x their peers.
I don't think people are suggesting that 10x engineers are literally typing ten times faster than their counterparts, the "10x engineer" is someone who gets to complete solutions more efficiently — perhaps even 10 times more efficiently.
> To build on your example, while it's true that that Lewis Hamilton isn't driving 10 times faster, he has 103 F1 wins while to the average pro driver has zero.
Right, I'm not arguing (and I don't think anyone is arguing) that superstars don't exist in every field.
It's the "10x" part that is an annoying exageration. Nobody is an order of magnitue faster/better than other professionals in their field.
But you don't need to be 10x better to be a superstar. Being 1.01x better will do if you can keep it up consistently. That's enough to be always ahead and, except for the occasional error, most often win. It'll get you that 103:0 win ratio.
The consistency is the hard part. Anyone reasonably competent can be 1.01x faster here and there. To be the superstar it's not from being massively faster (as it's not humanly possibly), it's mostly from being very consistent at that 1.01x level.
I think Lewis Hamilton and Phelps — really, any athlete with household name status — are not just one but multiple orders of magnitude better than other professionals in their field.
I agree that the consistency is the hard part. I heard a take on this once that argued "10x" is more of a contingent state than something inherent to an individual, but if someone can consistently outperform their peers labeling them as such doesn't seem at all unfair.
The time it takes to write a program is closely related to how many things you don't understand well about such programs. This dynamic creates extreme performance differences between even fairly similarly competent people.
Example:
Programmer A is competent, he has good understanding about 90% of problems that comes up when he programs, so he has to stop and think and look things up 10% of micro tasks.
Programmer B is a bit more competent, he has good understanding about 99% of problems that comes up, so he has to stop and think just 1% of micro tasks.
The time it takes to finish is almost completely dependant on those parts you don't understand, the others you just fly through. So even though the understanding and skill of the above programmers looks very similar, programmer B who has fewer holes in his knowledge will likely perform about 10x better than programmer A. This makes programming very different from sports, in sports you don't run 10x faster just because you reduces your bodyfat by a factor 10 for example, so there those incremental improvements are barely noticeable since nobody who runs professionally has a lot of body fat.
> The time it takes to finish is almost completely dependant on those parts you don't understand, the others you just fly through. So even though the understanding and skill of the above programmers looks very similar, programmer B who has fewer holes in his knowledge will likely perform about 10x better than programmer A.
Agreed. I can't call that a 10x programmer though, it's just a matter of what is their field of expertise and how well it maps to the problem at hand. I'd say that stems from how we collectively use the word "programmer" (or developer, etc) to mean just about anything. Now move both A and B to a project domain where B has more knowledge gaps than A and suddenly A is the 10x programmer. But that means neither is really 10x, it just changes project to project.
To compare to other fields, imagine the top heart surgeon in the country. But then they get asked (for some weird reason) to do a knee surgery. Maybe they'll be able to muddle through it by remembering things from medical school and looking things up, but it'll be a much worse job compared to an orthopedic surgeon who does knees every day.
Would anyone in the medical industry say that this orthopedic surgeon is a 10x surgeon because they did it so much better compared to the heart surgeon? We can all laugh because that's clearly nonsense. But we use such comparisons in the software world as if they made sense.
Or to stay in sports, we'd never say the 100m champion is a 10x runner compared to the marathon champion. Sure they both run, but their skills are in different things.
I "believe" in 10x programmers. But sports is generally a poor analogy. You don't have anyone running 10x faster than the average running speed for example...
My mind goes to the Walter Peytons and the Michael Jordans and Tiger Woodses and the Serena Williamses, and so on. People who were so far ahead of the average -- even in a professional sport -- that they changed the nature of the game for everyone who has come after. It's not about pure score; it's about total performance.
You've got guys scoring 10x the points of other people though?
The reason it's awkward in sports is sports are head on competitive. Put a crappy team in a match with a good one and it's 10x. Two teams of equal skill don't seem like there is a lopsided talent.
Lets say that person A can reason about 1.5x more complex problems than his peers. His peers will be productive and contribute a lot of code until the codebase reaches their complexity limit, and then they start to really struggle. Lets say that A then comes onto that team at that moment, to A there is still plenty of room left before the project is beyond him, so he can work full speed as normal. In this situation A would probably contribute 10x more than anyone else on the team, not because he is 10x better but because he is still over that threshold.
> You've got guys scoring 10x the points of other people though?
Not 10x more than the median, I don't think.
(Happy to be proved wrong with a link to a player scoring 10x more than the median scorer[1]).
[1] In some games, like soccer, for example, it makes no sense to compare goals between strikers and goalies - goalies aren't expected to score, and so they almost never do.
Of course you're right about apples-to-apples but a guy like CR7 has scored quite a lot more goals than your average striker, surely? Keep in mind he also has had a longer career with more games, due to being really good. It's hard to say who is median because the not-top guys don't get that many games before they get sold to a lower standard team, or just benched.
Isn't it normal in basketball to have one guy dominating the points?
I think a better analogy would be e.g. scientists. I believe that there are certainly physicists who produce 10 times as much research output compared to the median.
But the real differentiator is in (both programming and science) the depth and quality, not quantity.
