[memracom]

In my experience 10X is more to do with the environment than it is to do with the programmer. I have been 10X and more in the past over maybe a 10 year stretch when I was doing lots of greenfield development and I also had control over the design, architecture and system configs. But now, in an environment with messy legacy code, and no control over architecture or systems, I seem to be more like .02X. At some point I will have mastered refactoring a big ball of mud and I will be able to get to 10X again.

And in case you were thinking, rewriting from scratch is not sufficient to transform a big ball of mud into a greenfield.

In any case, the opportunities for refactoring big balls of mud are growing exponentially so it is a worthwhile skill to master.