[mikece]

There will always be outliers but it really depends what thing the 10x programmer is making ten times more of. If it's simply lines of code then it can strongly be argued that he's creating 10x more technical debt as well, as one of the stories suggests. I've read that many outlier programmers are on the moderate-to-advanced portion of the autistic scale, at a place where it's actually a superpower in terms of being able to concentrate and write massive amounts of code and usually very good quality. The biggest problem with devs like that is that their colleages/teammates have a hard time keeping up with them and management usually tries to coerce others to try to catch up and not treat them like the benevolent freak they are. Even if there's no conflict with a high quality 10x performer there's also the future case problem of trying to figure out how to fill the shoes of such a dev if/when they leave. Management will never authorize hiring 10 people to replace that person, and unless the person was writing perfect code your maintenance is usually a lot more than your staff can handle as well. Are there other fields/jobs where someone can consistently produce 10x more than others simply on their own ability?

[AlchemistCamp]

> Are there other fields/jobs where someone can consistently produce 10x more than others simply on their own ability?

Sales. Some people can make it rain and generally nobody begrudges paying them well to do so.

[barry-cotter]

Fiction or non-fiction writing. The difference between Terry Brooks and the average wannabe fantasy author is enormous and the difference between him and JRR Tolkien is greater again.

Mathematics. Terence Tao is as far ahead of the average Math professor as they are of the average high school Math teacher.

Law. If you give the average lawyer twenty times as much time and all the research resources of a partner at Skadden Arps the Skadden guy will still come out on top.

Finance. Whether you’re talking VC, PE or Hedge Funds the people at the top are a lot more than ten times as good as the average, never mind the marginal member of their reference class.

All of academia as far as research is concerned. Research impact as measured by citations is a power law. People at top departments routinely get hundreds of times the citations of those at no name ones.

In any human endeavour that isn’t limited by severe bottlenecks in material input you get people who can do much more with much less than others can, and who are capable of doing things that those less skilled simply can’t do.

[rightbyte]

Add carpentry or vehicle technician to that list. All jobs where you have some sort of choice on how and what to do and motoric aptitude leads to high variance in skills.

The big difference is maybe that bad vehicle technicians are singled out by the boss or customers and quit? While neither the boss or customer can pinpoint a single programmer.

[tuesdayrain]

I think this boils down to literally any arbitrary skill based activity. Unless the output is heavily dependent on RNG, there will always be someone who is orders of magnitude better than the average person.

[yarg]

One other thing, software has the benefit that product development occurs in a simulation.

There's a freedom that comes with that, we're unbound by physics - layer upon layer of abstraction make it a lost concern.

It feeds into itself, growing in power at a rate proportional to its surface.

Until that is, it collapses under its own weight. When that happens is a matter of structure, and the extent to which the developer understands what the structure is, where it should be and how it must expand to cater for new requirements.

For simple cases a single largely linear block of code will be fine.

Eventually things get more complex. You'll need to move the lower level functionality to another file and call through to its methods.

Some of the methods in these files will become so heavily parameterised - and with repeat parameters - that you might want to introduce state. Welcome to OOP.

Then with the proliferation of the files you've created you'll need to introduce a directory structure.

Then a module structure.

Then a separation of API and implementations.

Then a division across projects.

At any of these points some will falter.

Some can't even write a single class without copying a pasting massive blocks of code. Some write class after class without consideration of abstraction or structure.

Yes there are 10x developers - those who understand structure and can implement the code accordingly.

Why does this happen in software and not other industries? As I said, we're unbound by reality.

If the best of us were engineers, we would be more tightly constrained by the physical limitations of the world.

If the worst of us were engineers, they would get people killed.

[ed312]

You've described how I feel about this in such a succinct yet expressive way. I find it hard to communicate to ${NON_PROGRAMMERS} the difference between highly skilled software folks, average skilled, and the huge bulk of copy+paste wannabe's.

[codingslave]

I agree with this, for anyone to be a 10x developer, most likely their brain has massive deficiencies in other areas of functioning. I've only worked with one 10x developer in my life. After seeing his code and problem solving abilities, I started to question whether I was any good at coding at all (and I am regularly regarded as the best on my team).

Finance is another industry that supports 10x employees, its common for traders with a natural ability at pattern recognition to produce 10x - 100x returns. Like technology, their minds can be leveraged by increasing the amount of capital they can manage.

[yarg]

The spectrum guys are good for deep dives and best operating practice based implementation, not so much on branching code and creativity.