[michaelochurch]

I'm going to comment. I really hope this doesn't get buried. That's absolutely true.

I call myself a 121 programmer, which is the MacLeod Sociopath of the programmer world. (911 are MacLeod Clueless because they're willing to throw down in an emergency that management created; 501 developers, who leave at 5:01, are MacLeod Losers.) I want to improve the value of my skill set by 1% every 21 days.

There is 10x of selectivity (choosing good projects) and also 10x of productivity (making good calls) with the latter especially prominent in powerful languages (e.g. Lisp). But "10x" doesn't happen overnight. It happens over a long time. Taking the 1%/21-days estimate (which is a wild guess, but the right binary order of magnitude) that means we go from 1x to 10x in 13.3 years (although I've actually seen people grow faster than that.)

The 10x programmers got that way by mandating that they learn, and ignoring career-incoherent work.