The Mythical 10x Programmer
This old chestnut again. Look, this is really simple. There are 10x people in EVERY endeavor. Why should programming be any different?<p>My favorite example is Tom Brady. Even among the 32 best quarterbacks in the ENTIRE WORLD, he has stood head-and-shoulders above them for DECADES. It&#x27;s an extreme example, and I hate sports, but it neatly shows that people CAN be THAT much better than their peers, and NOT necessarily carry the baggage that people want to automatically ascribe to such talent.<p>A few years back, I started working at a Fortune 250. The manager wanted me to rewrite, from scratch, a database application that kept track of &quot;tuning&quot; changes to ECM software. He had written a program to do it, but it was slow, and falling over as he added features and new groups to it. It took me about a year and half to understand the process, prototype the database schema, and get a beta version up and running, and then a few more months to get all the bugs worked out. Call it 2 years.<p>At the same time, another group -- who was SUPPOSED to be the ones responsible for writing this kind of software in the company -- restarted a decade-long, lapsed effort to do the same thing. (If they had written proper tools to begin with, this entire class of problem wouldn&#x27;t need to be solved in the first place, but I digress.) They off-shored the whole thing to a team of 10. It took them another year longer to get to beta, so 3 years.<p>So 2 man-years vs 30. According to this one project, I&#x27;m a 15x programmer.<p>Their program is so slow, they brought in Microsoft to try to fix it, and failed. My program can display a calibration in 6 seconds. Theirs takes 2 minutes... to get the FIRST PAGE of hundreds. It&#x27;s so counterintuitive, they&#x27;ve only managed to cajole the smallest engineering group into using it.<p>My program is still being used by thousands of engineers, and has run with only a few tiny patches for 4 years now.<p>Our reward for this outstanding success? We were forced to give our application to the other group. My boss was officially reprimanded, and forced out of his position. I was put out to pasture with a boss who buried all of my efforts with bureaucracy. An inquisition was held by the CIO about all of this. The boss that did all of this retribution was promoted.<p>My old boss got a new position. I left the company and came back in 3 months to work with him again.<p>Even after 40 years of programming being a thing, large manufacturing companies still want to try to treat programming as though it were production line work, and it&#x27;s just not. I would guess the situation is better at companies who understand that software is their primary product, but blue-chip companies are going to have to realize that EVERY company is a software-first company now.