Netflix CEO explains why he pays technologists huge salaries
I think 100x is hyperbol however you slice it, run away from anyone who tells you they are a 100x developer. 10x may be achievable... but I argue that it is at least partly due to the prevailing code-base. Every competent developer is a 10x developer on a green field project just like every competent developer is a 0.1x developer on a messy legacy spaghetti-code disaster of a project (Making the differential 100x I guess).<p>Good developers are the ones that create code that resists the slide from a 10x code-base to a 0.1x code-base. Important skills towards this end are a good sense for code architecture and testing discipline. But also: good communication, organization, documentation, teamwork.<p>As an anecdote, one of my favorite developers to work with at my current workplace is a &quot;high throughput&quot; developer but who is personable, tests and documents the crud out of everything he does and makes it easy to extend and fix bugs in his code for other developers. One of my least favorite people to work with is also a &quot;high throughput&quot; developer who is a prolific creator of software, but everything created by this person is an un-maintainable, un-documented, un-tested, brittle block of procedural copy-pasta that ends up in the critical business path. And yes, this developer &quot;snapped&quot; about a year ago and it has been a 3 person project ever since to scramble to fix this stuff.<p>So, moral of the story, be very careful with pure productivity as a metric for developers. Maybe a 100x developer is really just a 5x developer who enables 20 teammates to also be 5x developers?<p>EDIT:
I think I maybe didn&#x27;t make my point super clear. My theory is that there are two (somewhat) orthogonal dimensions that you can judge a developer by:<p>1) Productivity, ability to get things done, this is what I assume (maybe mistakenly) that people are talking about when talking about an Nx developer because it is the dimension that maps better to a quantifiable value.<p>2) Quality, ability to create code that is easy to work with and extend. This doesn&#x27;t map to a Nx scale at all.<p>One of these qualities contributes towards a goal by compounding linearly, independent of headcount. The other compounds exponentially and also with headcount and is clearly the superior thing to think about when considering developer skill.