A look at the 10x paradigm
I see the point here.<p>No matter what it&#x27;s called, you&#x27;re talking about people that don&#x27;t use best practices, for better or worse. Best practices will get you where you&#x27;re going in a predictable way, but there is a ton of inefficiency, as they don&#x27;t take your specific problem into account.<p>When I was new to moving away from best practices, I wrote a lot of difficult to understand code that was very performant. I spent my evenings reading documentation, reading the code of the people I admired (mostly decompiled framework code), and was very excited to put what I learned into practice and learn by experience. It made me proud to write code that out-performed my coworker&#x27;s code by orders of magnitude. I worked for one of the top 100 most trafficked sites in the US, and on a platform that was not designed for that level of traffic (none are).<p>A month later, the lead architect and I had a discussion that did not go my way. I was asked to write a very public and humbling apology to the team, and that apology still exists hosted on the internal network at that company (in a place that is easy to find). I had a lot of talent, but not a lot of wisdom. From that day on, I was to work on the most difficult projects exclusively, and under direct supervision of that architect. We worked on maintaining the performance edge, but doing so in a way that is easy for other developers to understand and extend. He taught me to interface directly with the other departments and senior management to make changes to the development process before work got to development; to enable us to do our best. It was a difficult road, and I was yelled at a lot; but eventually the architect cleared me to work without supervision. What followed is the most productive two years the company I worked for had ever had. I was promoted multiple times, was awarded patents, and was able to do a lot of lasting good. I had a hand in every project, feature, and department. I designed and internally evangelized a few myself, and had become the go-to guy to get difficult things done. You know this company, if I told you their name you&#x27;d recognize them and their product immediately (you&#x27;ve likely used my work).<p>I left about 4 years ago to build my own company. I do consulting during the day, and take jobs that require a hero to survive (to stay sharp). Since I left, there have been no significant new features or achievements out of the company I left.<p>Moral of the story: If you&#x27;re talented, your idea of a good night is reading documentation and decompiling&#x2F;memorizing products you like, and want to be a 10x developer; get someone you admire to yell at you, rip your work apart every day, and tell you that you&#x27;re garbage for a year. It will do you (and your company) a lot of good.