[hardwaregeek]

Y'know, productivity is kind of overrated. The programmers who I admire aren't the people who could implement a React CMS in record time, but the people who built React. Or Rust, or Haskell, or FFmpeg. I guess one could argue that the programmers are 10x, 100x or even (10^n)x simply because their work has helped other programmers become more effective, thus through the multiplier effect resulting in massive productivity. Or because you need someone who can work at 10x to build something of large impact. But first, that just means that Large Impact => 10x, not that 10x => Large Impact. Second, that's oversimplifying a massive, nuanced impact into a number for no real reason.

Honestly I suspect the idea of 10x developers was created as a way to explain to managers why you need to pay ol' Leslie over there the big bucks. If you claim Leslie works at 10x the speed and only needs 2x the salary, the math works out for a business major. So I guess that's the reason you need the number.

[terminaljunkid]

> If you claim Leslie works at 10x the speed and only needs 2x the salary, the math works out for a business major. So I guess that's the reason you need the number.

I think that's perfectly justified. So much is lost in software quality because those people think programming as dry labour and outsource to cheap sources, losing so much in future revenues but unfortunately that's not even measurable.

Joel Spolsky put it nicely in a post: It is not that it requires `n` bad programmers to do what one good programmer does. It is that `n` bad programmers can't build what a good programmer builds, no matter how big `n` is or how much time it takes.

[perl4ever]

If you know which algorithm to use or how to find one, then you can accomplish things with even greater multipliers. But empirically, people with many years of experience that have seen everything aren't valued so maybe it just isn't that valuable.

Maybe coordination problems just drown out individual productivity most of the time. Or, looking at it another way, if someone senior (as an IC) hasn't found their way into a position where they have leverage ("impact") already, then they don't have the only (meta-) skill that matters.

But then again, when you won't pay people enough to retain them and "Leslie" happens to be the most productive and abhor interviewing, then maybe you end up with literally one person replacing ten.