[mikekchar]

The reality of the situation is that rather than 10x programmers, there are actually 0.1x programmers. Frequently you will have teams that are so burdened by whatever hurdles are in their way that they produce only a tenth of what they could be producing. Interestingly, there are programmers who self impose those hurdles. There are programmers to impose those hurdles on others as well. Quite frequently, though, the hurdles are either imposed from afar, or occur as a result of unfortunate decision making that has accumulated over a number of years.

A real "10x" programmer is a programmer who is able to unshackled themselves from the burdens that turn them into 0.1x programmers. Beware, however, because many of these people achieve their productivity at the expense of others on the team. Indeed, there is a special breed of programmer who will inflict 0.1x burdens on the rest of the team precisely so that they can appear to be a 10x programmer.

I once worked on a team of 5000 programmers, where the average number of lines of code produced per programmer per day was 1. We can all argue that KLOC per month is a terrible productivity measure. However when your productivity is around 20 LOC per month (without the K), there is something seriously wrong ;-) 0.01x programmers (at best)????

[ClumsyPilot]

Are we talking about a case where a given developer has re-written 100 lines of code, and added 1 line net?

Or do you mean that only 1 line was written or re-written? If so, what are people doing, having 7-hour meetings?

[mikekchar]

No. We had 31 million lines of code and it was so complex that even changing 1 line had massive implications. Definitely the worst code base I've ever worked on. I originally started working there as a contractor because they had single functions which had reached the file size limits for their build system and they didn't know what to do (you know... maybe split this function up into smaller functions... maybe...). There were people who were unrolling loops because they were unaware that the compiler would do it for them under the hood. And then somebody would modify one part of that loop, so you'd be looking for some strange behaviour and it would be buried in the middle of some code that was copy and pasted 100 times. Total nightmare. Don't even get me started on how they did their memory allocation.

[sibeliuss]

Very curious to know what you were working on! 31 million lines of code?

[mikekchar]

It was a telephone switch (Now defunct Bell Norther Research)

[sibeliuss]

The scale of this is too vast to even conceive....