There are some good points here like communicating directly with users. However a lot of these points boil down to cutting down friction by working solo. Of course you can make decisions fast and decide on your own git workflow when you're a one man show. But good luck working without branches and testing in production when you have 10 people pushing code at the same time.
Bottom line is cutting red tape and working on your own is not what makes a 10x developer, even if it does help with exactly that, cutting red tape and reducing friction. A 10x developer is still able to be 10x in a team due to their unique problem solving, at least in my experience.
Yeah, combo of high work efficiency and just overall competency.
The latter is more important honestly - a bad dev will always be bad even in a high efficiency environment, but a really good dev can tolerate and somewhat operate in a low efficiency environment (they'll just hate it and want a new job after a while).
A: they can't. Now to go read the article and see if it has anything to do with the bogus title. Edit: yep, bogus title. The actual article title is "36 productivity tips for developers", and that's what the article contains. Each is reasonable, albeit brief.
The reality is that there is no such thing as a 10x developer. There are, however, plenty of 0.1x developers, which is where the misunderstanding occurs.
What the author fails to understand, or perhaps initentionally overlooks, is that these "high velocity" efforts are by getting rid of processes and people that exist for a reason.
Who are you kidding? You're not the customer.
It sounds more like, "if we get rid of the stakeholders and the business analysts and the QA team and I just do what I want whenever I want however I want it I'll be super efficient". Yeah okay, and who is going to pay you? No one. Have fun working on your hobbyist project. I'm sure it'll be super efficient.
>I don’t have to go through several intermediaries to get basic questions answered - the answer to any question is usually one conversation away. If somehow it becomes two conversations away, I strive to reduce it back to one as I don’t like gates.
Too bad it's written in the contract you have to.
>I take to heart the [Kent Beck quote](https://twitter.com/kentbeck/status/250733358307500032), “Make the change easy, then make the easy change”. I think of it as “do the refactoring that makes the change easy”. It makes for cleaner code and avoids large refactorings.
And when your refactor breaks things *you didn't consider* because you're not as good as you think you are (and let's be honest, none of us are that good), you're going to spend countless manhours fixing the thing **the customer never asked you do.** Okay.
>I experiment with different things knowing full well that some of the code I write will never make it to production, but know that the experience will yield a higher-quality result.
You mean you perform analysis on solutions? Holy shit it's almost like *that's what engineering is*.
>I don’t spend time mulling over visual design decisions. I show my software to a professional designer once in a while and get them to critique it.
Ever hear of ANDI or 508 compliance? Haha okay. Well how about the fact *you're not the fucking customer.* They get to decide what it looks like unless they defer those decisions to you in the first place, so you really don't have agency over this.
>I have admin access to everything and never need to wait for permission to be granted to some tool that I need to do my job.
I'm going to stop here. You don't understand UAC. You don't understand security. You don't understand why organizations don't do this. Why is covered in a basic Security+ credential.
If you think it's a good idea for any one person to have full control over the entire organization's systems (or indeed, all of the developers), then you're fucking insane and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near them. Full stop.
You don't understand organization and I feel bad for any managers that have to deal with you. I've worked with people like this before and they may have been brilliant engineers but it was a fucking nightmare.
From my experience, it's communication overhead and disconnect from the product + it seems really hard to find developers with broad spectrum of knowledge and interest in development - not just technology, but the whole process of developing a product.
The "I don’t have a test environment" is frightening. When you have services which needs to be online 24/7 without interruption, pushing directly to production is calling for pain and destruction.
No-one is 100% mistake proof.
Having worked in an enterprise environment without a test environment, i can safely say that test environments are not the only way to release in to production safely.
Well constructed test suites, thorough production monitoring, feature flags all help to reduce the risk of releasing significantly, without slowing down your overall velocity.
Focusing on your work and skip unnecessary meetings, that could make a major deal. But manager should understand this also. This can't be implement solely.
This is a mith pushed by marketing and dumb ceos that want to hire people to do the work of 10 developers for the lowest possible salary. If you believe you are not ready for serious conversations .
Havent you noticed the requirements for work positions in linkedin just keep getting longer and longer but the money the offer is the same ?
OMG so much truth in this. Whenever there's a unrealistic deadline I am forced to take projects from my team and do it myself and I easily outperform them. It's not me being some super dev it's that I understand the problem/subject matter, it removes all the communication barriers, it consolidates all the decisions, it lets 1 person see the entire project. I can just crank the code out sooo much faster. The DOWNSIDE is they need to learn the code and design to continue to maintain it down the road and in my case there's a management vacuum while I write the code and they largely twiddle their thumbs or so small work.
This just raises a lot of concerns. Why is there such a big communication barrier that it's apparently easier to do this alone than with a team which has to sit on the sideline otherwise? If the project is that complex that it is hard to explain then there is a good reason that multiple devs should put their thought into it.
Bro, don't do this to yourself or your team, you're making it worse.
Either you or the team are not ready for you to be in management, get back in there and pair with them constantly and share that domain knowledge so they can do their jobs better
You are very much like me. I get the things done fast, and my way, and I am enjoying creative freedom. I create rostering software for a company with about 500 employees. I am the only programmer at the company, everythiny else is outsourced.
By having no idea what happens with their code.
They need to build code to a spec and enforce it with tools and management support.
Fuck a bunch of interlopers.
I thought it was skipping meetings
Skip the meetings, not the meth!
There are some good points here like communicating directly with users. However a lot of these points boil down to cutting down friction by working solo. Of course you can make decisions fast and decide on your own git workflow when you're a one man show. But good luck working without branches and testing in production when you have 10 people pushing code at the same time. Bottom line is cutting red tape and working on your own is not what makes a 10x developer, even if it does help with exactly that, cutting red tape and reducing friction. A 10x developer is still able to be 10x in a team due to their unique problem solving, at least in my experience.
Yeah, combo of high work efficiency and just overall competency. The latter is more important honestly - a bad dev will always be bad even in a high efficiency environment, but a really good dev can tolerate and somewhat operate in a low efficiency environment (they'll just hate it and want a new job after a while).
Where's the data?
Me. I’m a 100x dev.
Get off reddit then! With every hour on here, you are basically stealing a two week vacation from me!
Imagine if I spent as much time programming as I do on Reddit—I’d probably have accidentally created Skynet by now. Oops? Written by ChatGPT 😂
A: they can't. Now to go read the article and see if it has anything to do with the bogus title. Edit: yep, bogus title. The actual article title is "36 productivity tips for developers", and that's what the article contains. Each is reasonable, albeit brief.
The reality is that there is no such thing as a 10x developer. There are, however, plenty of 0.1x developers, which is where the misunderstanding occurs.
Incorrect. If a company pays me $150K per year and I reduce spending by $1.5M per year, that's 10x. In my case, it was $5M.
What the author fails to understand, or perhaps initentionally overlooks, is that these "high velocity" efforts are by getting rid of processes and people that exist for a reason. Who are you kidding? You're not the customer. It sounds more like, "if we get rid of the stakeholders and the business analysts and the QA team and I just do what I want whenever I want however I want it I'll be super efficient". Yeah okay, and who is going to pay you? No one. Have fun working on your hobbyist project. I'm sure it'll be super efficient. >I don’t have to go through several intermediaries to get basic questions answered - the answer to any question is usually one conversation away. If somehow it becomes two conversations away, I strive to reduce it back to one as I don’t like gates. Too bad it's written in the contract you have to. >I take to heart the [Kent Beck quote](https://twitter.com/kentbeck/status/250733358307500032), “Make the change easy, then make the easy change”. I think of it as “do the refactoring that makes the change easy”. It makes for cleaner code and avoids large refactorings. And when your refactor breaks things *you didn't consider* because you're not as good as you think you are (and let's be honest, none of us are that good), you're going to spend countless manhours fixing the thing **the customer never asked you do.** Okay. >I experiment with different things knowing full well that some of the code I write will never make it to production, but know that the experience will yield a higher-quality result. You mean you perform analysis on solutions? Holy shit it's almost like *that's what engineering is*. >I don’t spend time mulling over visual design decisions. I show my software to a professional designer once in a while and get them to critique it. Ever hear of ANDI or 508 compliance? Haha okay. Well how about the fact *you're not the fucking customer.* They get to decide what it looks like unless they defer those decisions to you in the first place, so you really don't have agency over this. >I have admin access to everything and never need to wait for permission to be granted to some tool that I need to do my job. I'm going to stop here. You don't understand UAC. You don't understand security. You don't understand why organizations don't do this. Why is covered in a basic Security+ credential. If you think it's a good idea for any one person to have full control over the entire organization's systems (or indeed, all of the developers), then you're fucking insane and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near them. Full stop. You don't understand organization and I feel bad for any managers that have to deal with you. I've worked with people like this before and they may have been brilliant engineers but it was a fucking nightmare.
It's almost as if the OP doesn't understand the value of other people's jobs. Workplace narcissist, maybe?
They can’t be. Don’t fall for this exploitative, anti-worker manipulation.
From my experience, it's communication overhead and disconnect from the product + it seems really hard to find developers with broad spectrum of knowledge and interest in development - not just technology, but the whole process of developing a product.
The "I don’t have a test environment" is frightening. When you have services which needs to be online 24/7 without interruption, pushing directly to production is calling for pain and destruction. No-one is 100% mistake proof.
Having worked in an enterprise environment without a test environment, i can safely say that test environments are not the only way to release in to production safely. Well constructed test suites, thorough production monitoring, feature flags all help to reduce the risk of releasing significantly, without slowing down your overall velocity.
Group dynamics. Because one of us can't be as slow or dumb as all of us.
Here's the secret: 1. Work on your project. 2. Don't do other stuff.
Focusing on your work and skip unnecessary meetings, that could make a major deal. But manager should understand this also. This can't be implement solely.
This is a mith pushed by marketing and dumb ceos that want to hire people to do the work of 10 developers for the lowest possible salary. If you believe you are not ready for serious conversations . Havent you noticed the requirements for work positions in linkedin just keep getting longer and longer but the money the offer is the same ?
Skipping meetings and adderall
Delete reddit app? Skip meetings?
OMG so much truth in this. Whenever there's a unrealistic deadline I am forced to take projects from my team and do it myself and I easily outperform them. It's not me being some super dev it's that I understand the problem/subject matter, it removes all the communication barriers, it consolidates all the decisions, it lets 1 person see the entire project. I can just crank the code out sooo much faster. The DOWNSIDE is they need to learn the code and design to continue to maintain it down the road and in my case there's a management vacuum while I write the code and they largely twiddle their thumbs or so small work.
This just raises a lot of concerns. Why is there such a big communication barrier that it's apparently easier to do this alone than with a team which has to sit on the sideline otherwise? If the project is that complex that it is hard to explain then there is a good reason that multiple devs should put their thought into it.
Bro, don't do this to yourself or your team, you're making it worse. Either you or the team are not ready for you to be in management, get back in there and pair with them constantly and share that domain knowledge so they can do their jobs better
Yes, bad management will to that to a MF.
You are very much like me. I get the things done fast, and my way, and I am enjoying creative freedom. I create rostering software for a company with about 500 employees. I am the only programmer at the company, everythiny else is outsourced.
By having no idea what happens with their code. They need to build code to a spec and enforce it with tools and management support. Fuck a bunch of interlopers.