[MawNicker]

> Especially in a world awash in bad developers.

Your comment is totally reasonable. You're being down-voted because the sentiment of that statement is so negative but in some ways it's true. There is widespread encouragement from society for individuals to learn how to program. In the last 5 decades the group that operates primarily from this motivation has exploded. The much older fanatical nerd group (originating with Charles Babbage himself) has seen more modest growth. This latter group operates primarily from intrinsic motivation. They would have an earnest desire to achieve the improvements you've stated. Simply to see if they can. Their love for their craft and overall playful orientation eventually accumulates. They quickly familiarize themselves with the whole bag of tricks. They have wet dreams about things like binary search. You just can't compete with someone who loves what they do. The more monetary incentive there is to do something the more those people are few and far between. So yes, I agree that the phenomenon is relative and that it is so extreme (10x) mostly because so many developers are merely "good enough" (1x). I still think there's a lot to be said about how much an environment enables the expression of a 10x programmer. It is most common that "good enough" really is good enough and going extreme doesn't make anything better.

[hexagonc]

I have no problem speaking of bad developers because I myself was one. Now, I am probably above average and in some organizations maybe even a "10x" developer. But I shudder thinking of some of the code samples that I've sent to prospective employers in my earlier days (~12 years ago) -- code that I thought was good and clever. Probably most junior developers are bad and I suspect a lot more code gets written by junior developers than we'd like to think. The senior developers get to work on the interesting problems and they leave the necessary but boring coding work to the junior developers.

[MawNicker]

I was also a bad developer. Then I was a "clever" developer. Then I was rewriting everything from nothing because I needed to know how it worked. Doing so is a great way to get a sense of how much "secret sauce" there is in a domain. The C++ standard library has a lot for instance. My naive implementations never came close.

> I suspect a lot more code gets written by junior developers than we'd like to think.

This may be true if you just measure lines of code. But if you couple that measure with the number of times each line was actually executed I suspect you'd see a different story. My library, for example, was comparable in size to parts of the standard library it replaced. So by direct measure a junior developer wrote half the code. But when you measure it by usage you can see the magnificent results of the 10x programmers at Boost and otherwise working on the C++ standard library. Notably their 10x-ness is in the performance of their code and not their performance on the job. Like you described.

[raarts]

People with experience in the field have been telling me I am a very good programmer. I always compare myself to the car mechanic who holds a screwdriver to the engine, puts his ear on it, and immediately hears that the third valve needs replacement.