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I’ve worked with more than one “10x” programmer. Their brilliance is astonishing, but their output is rarely practically realized. 1
They are often crazy. Literally crazy. One of ‘em I worked with was a CS student at Berkeley in the 60s and, in order to get lots of computer time at night, took lots of acid and coded away in the dark. He was a superb programmer, but wacko. 2
Another “10x” programmer I worked with coded during meetings, coded instead of talking with you. He was brilliant, and changed the world of tech, was successful by any measure, but a big part of his company consisted of people cleaning up after him. 3
I worked with another “10x” programmer who wrote a C compiler from scratch in four months, and bragged about it unrelentingly. Then the bugs began to emerge. It took him 2 years to get it working and by that time the company he worked for shitcanned it. 4
The 10x thing works only if the 10xer goes off by themselves and creates something, then lets a team turn it into something useful. 5
In other words, the only way a programmer can perform at 10x level is if he (it’s always a ‘he’) has a support system that sacrifices 9x of their own time and attention. 6
The 10x programmer is essentially a libertarian concept: That is, they do it all by themselves because they don’t recognize how much is done for them by others. 7
I first read about the 10x programmer in 1975 in Jerry Weinberg’s excellent book, The Psychology of Computer Programming. The concept was identified at IBM. Programming was still brand new at that time and IBM wanted to learn all about it. 8
The 10x was based on lines of code. The 10x programmer produced ten times the lines of code that most programmers produced. LINES OF FUCKING CODE. That rubric has been debunked for about the last 30 years. 9
Back in the oughts, I visited the HQ of a huge internet co. The exec who toured me around extolled all the progressive work they were doing, then he introduced me to the Guy. 10
It was the Guy who wrote their product. The 10x Guy. He was the entire basis for their billion dollar company. All their other products were little daisies planted around His Sequoia. 11
I had been invited there to speak on interaction design. You know, making things good for the user. This Guy made clear that things would be whatever he said they would be, users be damned. All the execs were terrified of the Guy, because he held their nuts in his hand. 12
Once the darling of Wall Street, this company is now gone. Pffft. 13
I once hired a gifted programmer who probably considered himself a 10xer. He was an exceptionally good programmer, blowing my mind with his skills more than once. He was also quiet, considerate, modest, and generous. 14
But he drove everyone around him crazy. He would wait until the weekend and then, one by one, pull everyone’s source code out of the library and replace all of the tabs with spaces (or vice versa I forget). 15
One day I asked the team what we could be doing to make things better. He suggested that we should use less profanity around the office (we all worked remotely). 16
He was an exceptional solo talent, but a problematic team player. And I say this as a legendarily problematic team player in my own right. My point is that shitty professional behavior is often the baseline for engineers. We have to proactively fight against it. 17
