Myth of the 10x Developer: Technical Interviews are Broken, (part 2 of n)

One of the reasons the code-test LeetCode HackerRank style interview process started was because of the myth that there were 10x developers, and that, by interviewing well, you could fill your big tech company with just those top performers.
And that's how we got here.
And, chances are, most companies will stay here.
But, if your company interviews differently, then in my experience, you can get a huge productivity advantage.
00:00 Video Intro
00:20 Channel Intro
00:34 Categories of programmers for our purposes
04:16 The Original. Flawed, 1960s Experiment
06:00 A few truths underlying the myth
07:48 Context for the argument in the video
08:29 My argument against 10x developers in corp settings
09:49 Not a skill issue, and not something LeetCode can detect
12:00 What LeetCode might select for at many companies
13:03 The advantage companies can have without LeetCode
14:21 A better focus, according to me, not that it will matter
16:03 This one neat trick for better productivity
17:28 Back full circle to where we started
Links from the video:
The Mythical Man Month:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myt...
Great book - highly recommended. I didn't talk much about it in this video, but i'm sure it will come up in the future.
Original Paper that used toy programs to invent the 10x myth:
web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/4...
Modern paper dispelling the 10x myth:
insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/pro...

[@Pherecydes]

If I were a 10x developer I'd split my productivity up between 10 jobs and collect 10 salaries.

[@MoneyballTV]

Gotta automate meetings with 1x normie coworkers

[@steftrando]

I mean, that’s consulting

[@markdotinc8371]

The 10x programmers are just too dumb to manage expectations wisely

[@matthewdouglas2373]

10 times the standup meetings isn't even 100 times the salary

[@kyleleblancvlogs3820]

If I was a 10x dev I would have already created devin myself closed source, patented it, and then automated myself 100 jobs and be a millionaire 🤣.

[@jetfaker6666]

As a 0.3x developer im relieved to hear people aren't really over 30x better than me.

[@emanuelfrazao6984]

*33

[@maxron6514]

33.3333333333333333333333

[@SweepAndZone]

​@emanuelfrazao6984 lmfao that's why he's a 0.3 developer 😂

[@jetfaker6666]

@@SweepAndZone I said over 30x. Even 0.3 developers know how to define bounds :)

[@asplodr4422]

"Managers as a whole almost never want to create or be part of a process that holds managers responsible for anything." Preach.

[@seinfan9]

As soon as you attach yourself to the end of the human centipede, the immediate thought is "I won't rock the boat because I'll move up if I just eat it all without complaint."

[@mtsurov]

@@seinfan9that is a brutal yet apot on analogy. Well done.

[@andywest5773]

At one theoretical company I know about, developers were required to create estimates for work on a project that has a hard deadline. The deadline was established before any of the developers were even hired. My guess is that when the team fails to deliver on time (and they will), management can then blame the developers for their "bad estimates".

[@shiouming]

I thought that's a rare culture that happened only in one of my ex companies 😬 Sadly, one of the engineering managers with genuine strong leadership and widely known track record, his progression somehow stuck, while other managers with high turnover rate and not so positive reputation got promoted very fast. It seems corporate bs not only impact talented engineers but also demoralised passionated managers.

[@mrunix00]

If 10x developers are a myth how did I become one? It takes 10 developers to fix my garbage

[@kyleleblancvlogs3820]

🤣 that made me chuckle

[@Ni8mR]

ha ha ha

[@gautambhatnagar4765]

😂

[@jonathanscholtes7005]

😂

[@zacharymorel]

Hello fellow Prime viewer!

[@ca-taylor]

According to the Coding War Games study in Peopleware, they really did find a 10x difference in productivity, i.e., some individuals got their task done 10x faster than others. The catch? They had actually measured that there was a 10x difference between organizations, not people. Within an organization, the average difference was about 20%. Your guess at 9:23 was spot on. Quote: "This is more than a little unsettling. Managers for years have affected a certain fatalism about individual differences. They reasoned that the differences were innate, so you couldn’t do much about them. It’s harder to be fatalistic about the clustering effect. Some companies are doing a lot worse than others. Something about their environment and corporate culture is failing to attract and keep good people or is making it impossible for even good people to work effectively."

[@InternetOfBugs]

I have seen really, really good performing programmers whose productivity fell off a cliff when their boss moved on and a new one came in, and I've seen a "problem employee" become a top performer after their old manager transferred them off to another group to get rid of them.

[@jarv1s104]

3:15 "The guy that wrote Linux" is definitly one of the possible descriptions of Linus xD

[@InternetOfBugs]

Every time I say his name to a large group, someone tells me I'm pronouncing it wrong, even when I pronounced it like the person that complained last insisted. So I just try to avoid pronouncing it at all when speaking in public.

[@XDarkGreyX]

I recently read his surname for the first time in years and went "it ends with an S????"

[@bionic_batman]

Yeah, also you can describe him as the guy who created Git

[@fxlltxtsearch]

@@InternetOfBugssmart man

[@styrofoamsoldier]

@@InternetOfBugs It's "Lee-nus" like Bruce Lee and the "u" in "nus" is pronounced like the letter "u" but without the J sound. "Tour-valds", "Tor" is closer to how "Tour" is pronounced in english and "valds" has an "a" sound that is closer to how the first vocal in "out" is pronounced. I'm Finnish and that's how we say it, IPA would be useful here huh... edit: I guess the "ou" sound goes for both first and last name actually

[@alexaneals8194]

I fall into a separate category of programmers. I am generally brought in to troubleshoot and modify existing legacy apps. So, I am more of maintenance programmer than building out new apps. It's a lot harder to track performance since it depends on the bug (issue) and it's complexity. Some bugs are easy squash and others take time to track down.

[@ttcc5273]

productivity is context dependent: the developer, their motivation, their level of understanding of the problem domain, the project, the team...

[@ITNoetic]

Two of the companies I applied for jobs at over the past year have since closed down. I actually interviewed at one of them. I failed the interview due to not knowing the answer to a single trivia question about lock free and wait free in C++, which I'd never used nor heard of. I wasn't happy when I searched about it later and, after about 20 seconds of reading a blurb on it, understood the concept well enough to teach a class on it (basically, a technique for allowing shared resource access among multiple threads without using mutexes or locks by having each thread access the resource from some managed offset). In that same interview loop, one of the interviewers bragged about how one of their recs had been open for over 2 years with no hire (graphics engineer).

[@user-oj7uc8tw9r]

Bragging about not hiring people for a position? Looks like you dodged a bullet there

[@ITNoetic]

@@user-oj7uc8tw9r I get where you're coming from, but I would've happily taken their money for the month they lasted after rejecting me. Software engineer beggars can't be choosers. I just completed a 10-hour contract the other day. Things are... Tight

[@mikhailryzhov9419]

10x programmer needs 10x-compatible problems and 10x company. Standard corporate job has neither. If you hire a world-class mathematician to do long division don’t be surprised he might not be that good.

[@geedad]

How do you only have 26k subscribers? Ive been in tech 20 yrs including senior leadership roles and I am so glad to find someone I agree with on many things and I can still learn from. Will be following along with you here. Thanks for sharing.

[@InternetOfBugs]

I think because the first video I published (on this channel or anywhere - aside from some conference talks I've given that got recorded) was March 4th, 2024 (not quite 7 weeks ago, as I type this). So I'm actually pretty surprised that as many people have found the channel as quickly as they have.

[@stateofmissouri5651]

@@InternetOfBugs this channel sort of has the "maturity" if that is the right word, or feel of a channel that has been around a while and knows what it is doing. Thats what got my sub!

[@emyrulz]

You touched on the essential point that most people simply do not perform at their best (they stumble on every pothole in the road) whereas the fast and productive people seem to magically not do that. I agree that management contributes to this a lot but more of it to me seems to simply be a familiarity issue. We tend to forget that a lot of software, tools, techniques and "best practices" are kind of ad-hoc, change all the time and are not very well synthetized. This means that if you happen to think like the person who wrote the system/library/architecture/whatever, you will simply fly over all the bumps and potholes whereas if you are unlucky and you happen to think in a somewhat orthogonal way, you will hit all the snags. Because boy oh boy there are tons of them! This also compounds and builds momentum over time until you are either a superstar (everyone cheers you from you early successes) or a failure (everyone puts you down more and more reinforced by your past failures).

[@alexxmde]

I also took a paycut and came back to be an individual contributor. That was the smartest decision I've made in my carreer. For the same reasons that you mentioned: I don't have the temperament to be a manager, I have nightmares with "managing up" and care too much about people underneath me.

[@AftercastGames]

I’ve managed to avoid getting “promoted” to manager my whole career. I’ve seen what that does to people, and I don’t want to go anywhere near it. As best as I can tell, being a mid-level manager consists of going to one meeting to report status to higher managers, and then going to another meeting to tell everyone what you were told to tell everyone by the higher managers. Sounds like a nightmare to me.

[@scotterd]

"When companies say that the Leetcode interview process is very very important and that they want to make sure that they go through that process because it makes for employees that perform better, I think that what they're actually saying is 'Our managers are really bad and our environment is miserable and we're trying to select for people with a temperament to perform well even when they're miserable'" So well said.

[@steveoc64]

I think 10x devs exist - except that like everyone else, they operate in 0.2x mode for most of the time, then hit 10x during bursts of unusual creativity that may stretch for a few days. We have developed Agile and constant meetings as a sure fire method to make sure nobody can get creative anymore and fly off to 10x land.

[@PiotrPilinko]

If they discovers their full potential and have some soft skills (which might be difficult), they left companies to star their own business and after that they are stopping coding due to other duties.

[@cadekachelmeier7251]

I always make sure to estimate thinking I'll have no distractions and get to my 10x zen state.

[@alexxmde]

Absolutely! Current agile process is a copy paste of big techs: squads, code reviews, etc. I work at 0.2x speed because I know that if I implement improvements or any extra thing I will have to explain it, have it reviewed by 2 or 3 individuals who don’t have the context, and setup for the most common mediocre implementation, and get no rewards for it but stress. So I limit myself to be a “ticket machine gun” and only implement what is explicitly asked in the requirements and what’s in my name in the board. In our org, there are only very senior developers who own a piece of the app. Code review just slows us down, it should be optional in most contexts. And edit: I only get compliments since I started doing this And edit 2: off course we already lost the deadline, by two months ago

[@steveoc64]

@@alexxmde Great comment ! Yeah, I forgot all about the wonders of what they call "code review" in modern software development When I worked on big defence projects before all this agile crap, we used to have a really interesting and detailed code review process that was backed by proper cross referenced design and test plan documentation. Post agile, its just a bunch of green Javascript experts telling you that your C code is "wrong" because it doesnt use some functional design pattern that they like - which has nothing to do with the code, whilst another green Javascript expert tells you that your ASM code is "wrong" because it doesnt conform to their ideas on Dependency Injection, which is not needed by the program. Its a complete waste of time. Good job on being the ticket machine gun - belt fed, water cooled, love it !

[@absurd0000]

Keep going! Love hearing old school code guys being real. constant W takes

[@bawbak8800]

From my experience, those 10x (or more productive) developers in companies are the ones that they try harder to prove themselves to others. And in fact, they are just the louder people and shout any small thing that they do that will cause managers will see them more compare to the others. Unfortunately, I was one of those and couldn't believe how much easier my job became when I just tried to be louder than others and how others that even I knew that they had done a lot more than me, but my manager was telling me that they're not working good enough. And usually more (real) experienced developers are the ones who know a lot and can do a lot, but they choose to not do that, and instead spend more of their energy and their time on their personal life and goal, not for the company.

[@mikem3579]

As a software engineer in their second year in a corporate environment, your videos have been really helpful. Keep it up!

[@carmalinekeshi9296]

so the x in 10x implies multiplication? can a 10x developer do 40 hours of work in 4? will his boss let him come in half a day on Monday and take the rest of the week off? If you do 50 weeks of work in 5, do you get to go on sabbatical for the rest of the year?

[@InternetOfBugs]

I'm thinking this is sarcasm, but I'm guessing that there will be people (especially people unfamiliar with American language conventions) that might have this question for real. Yes, in the original paper that the "10x" idea came from (web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/481/readings/productivity-performance.pdf - also linked in the description) they measured the ratio of the time taken by the fastest and slowest programmers to complete a toy problem. They concluded: "one poor performer consumes as much time or cost as 5, 10, or 20 good ones. Validated techniques to detect and weed out these poor performers could result in vast savings in time, effort, and cost." For what it's worth, I actually had someone say to me this weekend that they really liked Sprints, because they could crunch all their work the first couple of days and then coast the rest of the time.

[@TheEternalVortex42]

Not all of the 40 hours is coding work and obviously no one thinks you can be 10x faster at sitting through meetings. Also the 10x is comparing fastest to slowest, not fastest to average. So you could imagine a developer that accomplishes the same amount of work coding 8 hours a week as a typical develop accomplishes in 24 hours/week (and a slow developer would take 80 hours). That doesn't seem too unreasonable to me, indeed I know of devs that work

[@darkarchon2841]

This is my favorite channel. Please keep this up going as long as possible, this is pure gold!

[@mtsurov]

Excellent material. Appreciate you putting this together. So far this channel has been a gem.

[@ironuckles]

This is the best analysis I've ever heard of how the industry really works.

[@RachelShadoan]

I was a manager for the last two years and I loved leading a team so much. But it felt like there was no reward in management for caring about the wellbeing of the engineers and the quality of the product shipped. my team was shipping high quality software on time, but because I was pushing back on the culture of shipping unfinished software and had reduced the velocity of the team in order to ship working software, I was eventually fired. I wish management felt like a viable path; I loved stewarding a team and growing engineers. But I am not sure it is possible to be a manager in this industry in a way that aligns with my values.

[@crepantherx]

I am a DE by profession, I feel like, though you are super senior to me, but much of my mindset matches with you [respectfully]. I wish I could be interviewed by you sometime in future(not for job, but for self reflection)

[@papayaspice1155]

15:42 "The times that I was a manager were some of the most very miserable times of my life" - this is super relatable. Please do speak about it in a future video!

[@MgelikaXevi]

really glad that @CodingAfterThirty mentioned your channel, and this way I found all of these great videos. Good to see a content that is both based in reality and refreshing in the same time

[@benjaminthorp2208]

So many good takes keep these coming man, super important topics to discuss to try to fix this sick industry we’re in.

[@moneymaker7307]

I think you touch on of the biggest points. Companies want to treat developers as just another cog in the machine. The idea of leetcode style interviews and looking for 10x engineers is only sustainable because of bad labor laws and immigration. Big companies don’t have to do the hard work of finding good managers. They can implement pip quotas. I mean they have access 50-70k migrant workers desperate for visa every year, so why the hell not.

[@davidkilmer]

Great stuff. Really thought-provoking. The categories are a really useful framing for understanding this. I always think of one additional category: the "specialist" programmer. This is the person who writes hardware drivers, language compilers, kernel modules, etc. -- things that require really deep knowledge. I think we often are thinking about people like that when we imagine a 10x programmer. A lot of the "10x" programmers I've met irl are what John Ousterhout (in _A Philosophy of Software Design_) called a "tactical tornado". They produce a lot of code very quickly, but usually make big messes that others end up having to clean up.

[@rotta2736]

Amazing video, would love a video expanding on the management issues that you touched on!

[@LucasGabriel-xz8nk]

I discovered you today and you make me think to much, thank you and great work!

[@kevinb1594]

What companies need to do is accept the fact that they need to take responsibility for their company culture and foster environments where employees want to stay and then TRAIN them to the level they're looking for. The time spent vetting new candidates would be better served onboarding, training and doing actual work.

[@charleshartlen3914]

Really nice video dude. thanks for this discussion, I really enjoy hearing you discuss these topics and give your 2 cents. Keep on pumping out the content!

[@tropictiger2387]

10:06 This is a good point. At my previous job when I was asked to interview people I would ask them basic things about the garbage collector works (It was a C# shop) or about how they would structure a certain type of program or something similar just to get them talking to see how intelligently they could discuss a topic. Even if they didn't know something, how they reacted to not knowing can tell you about their personality.

[@assafdarsagol]

writing bad code very rarely has anything to do about skill - and has a lot to do with culture, social skills, ethics and relationships.

[@torham]

Largely agree with this. I believe that some developers are 10x more productive on a project. Usually its because they know 10x more about the project, perhaps they are the ones who wrote the bulk of it. Managers can definitely sabotage good developers. Also for some reason I find the people using vi/emacs are generally better than those using all the new hip tools.

[@manishm9478]

Your point about how leetcode interviewing makes twisted sense if you want to find developers who will keep performing when they're miserable made me laugh out loud 😂 Great talk. I think that while 10x developers are a myth, 10x teams are possible. But managers put too much energy into interviewing new devs, instead of taking a hard look at the culture they've created

[@DiegoMonroyF]

I agree with almost all of this. Computer Science and Software Engineering jobs as a whole are pretty recent--lawyers, businessmen, civil engineers or politicians are ancient traditions that have slowly evolved through time, while a MERN stack engineering position will be born and completely die off during half the lifetime of a programmer. This is an industry that moves at a breakneck speed and it should definitely pause a bit to reiterate its recruiting process just as it did with its software engineering lifecycle practices. Sadly, right now there's a huge amount of unemployed engineers and so we have an "employer's market" in the US, but I hope that in a couple of years we'll have some books or TED talks or research papers that point towards fairer and more scalable recruiting practices--I know plenty of engineers that would be top performers at FAANG but have desisted of applying out of fear of leetcode questions and ruthless exams (aka "interviews"). Who knows? Maybe this channel will kick off that self reflection in the industry.

[@CuriousCyclist]

Just discovered your channel. Really good content. Thanks.

[@devvilboyy676767]

"Leet code dependant companies...Our managers are really bad and we're trying to select people with the temperament to perform well even when they are miserable" - I rarely proceed with leet code challenges because they don't measure anything but you're skill to solve toy puzzles, but I never thought of it like that and you make a lot of sense. 4/5 of the companies I worked for never presented me with a coding assessment and they were fantastic places. Even the one that did was a basic problem and they also turned out to be a great place to work. but most that require complex and long interview process are mostly shitty companies.

[@svenbjorn9700]

Puzzle interview questions are a proxy for IQ. Every employer cares about IQ, but legal precedent makes them uncomfortable requiring an explicit test for it, or asking for other proxy results like your SAT score, so giving a roundabout IQ test that seems "justifiable" is where these interview puzzles have their roots. It's stuff that should be well known but the clown world we live in incentivizes obfuscating everything.

[@drno87]

IQ tests themselves are generally a proxy for schooling. Puzzle questions likewise are more focused on stuff you'd do for a tricky problem set in a classroom.

[@georgerogers1166]

No. Iq exists and many people who have outlier high iq hate school.

[@DefinitelyNotAMachineCultist]

Pretty much saying the quiet part out loud. Although puzzle questions allow candidates to prepare and potentially perform beyond their 'natural' aptitude to some extent in a way that's harder to do with proper IQ tests. Stuff like _Cracking the Coding Interview_ and LeetCode, etc. It may be that employers want some combination of intellect and/or other innate/deep-rooted traits like conscientiousness (example from the Big 5 model of personality traits). If they set a hard cut-off point for IQ instead, the pool of viable candidates at the price they want may shrink too much. And the problem with gauging something like conscientiousness through a personality test is that those, even the good ones, are not 'self-validating' in the way that IQ tests can be. So if you need to validate anyway, might as well do something that requires either very high innate talent, or moderate innate talent and very high work ethic, etc. Larger candidate pool, less 'problematic' to lawyers looking for lawsuits or journos looking to stir up a fuss, and last but not least: Much of programming is blue collar work disguised as white collar work. Unless you're a true genius, it's extremely difficult to improve on the results you will get from fast, disciplined, and carefully guided trial and error. Example: If you have an obscure legacy codebase needing 1 or 2 bugs fixed, dredged up by management to be used again, where no one's even gotten a debugger working correctly in years, with a ton of async state management code that involves network calls, you can: A. Build a mental model of the code, take it slowly, mentally masturbate over the codebase a bit, etc. Eventually you may get the right solutions, and even learn the codebase better! Which ceases to be useful when they move you to something else in a matter of weeks. All that time was mostly wasted. B. Insert some damn logs anywhere they might be even remotely useful, which is tedious, even with 1-keypress log statements for any variable, but results in far less thinking, much more time saved in the long run, and avoids having to learn codebase-specific quirks which are not transferable or useful beyond a certain point. I've seen so many people try something similar to A, or ask around, when B will take less than 30 minutes at most, and will resolve their only work task for that entire day more or less. You see where data may be missing, late, or in an unexpected shape, even when the control flow is non-linear. It's actually insane how often something like this can trip up even corporate engineers with years of experience, for hours. A lot of them would have gotten filtered out or forced to pick up a good bag of tricks if there was a litmus test similar to the LeetCode stuff the Bay Area uses. Even just a debugging test.

[@DefinitelyNotAMachineCultist]

@@drno87 Correlation between IQ and schooling does not imply causation. Historical data like the stuff illustrating the Flynn effect (recent studies suggest this trend may be plateauing or reversing in some regions) shows that factors such as improved living conditions and healthcare contribute to (seemingly) rising IQ scores (at least pushing them to some kind of 'phenotypic maximum'), not merely education alone. High IQ may lead to better educational opportunities, and it also implies parents that are similarly high (which almost always means high earners, who may prize education for their children for reasons tied to status/signalling more than actual increases in competence), but the reverse impact of schooling on inherent IQ appears to be more limited than people tend to assume. We're talking single digit shifts here at most. IQ is distinct from domain-specific expertise and skill. Plus, what does schooling even mean these days? Almost anyone who can get a foot in the door of an employer will at least have gone through high school. These days, for education to stand out, you at least need a STEM degree, but when more and more people have that too, it's less and less useful as a filtering and sorting mechanism. Degree hyperinflation. You see employers shifting away from degrees in many fields (even technical ones) where they aren't hard requirements due to things like regulatory compliance. Though you're probably right that the puzzle tests are meaningfully distinct from an IQ test.

[@chudchadanstud]

If you fill your company with 10x devs then all the 10x devs will look like 1x devs and all th 1x devs will look like 0.1x devs.

[@jorderon]

Please do discuss the manager topic you mentioned.

[@AI-xi4jk]

I think measuring volume of trivial work tasks that can be done by a “10x” developer does not paint the whole picture. There are inherently hard programming problems or areas where it takes a special person to be able to get things done. Some of these require a lot of knowledge and experience, others higher programming IQ. An average developer might be able to eventually solve same problems but would have to take lots of time to learn related things and fail at trying that sometimes it’s just impractical. I don’t know how to describe this in terms of a coefficient, rather we just know such people who can solve really difficult problems and get huge volume of work done day after day. Such skill takes long time to acquire and is definitely beyond 20% margin of improvement.

[@opusdei1151]

Really good video I was enjoying listening to your good arguments about the field

[@osazemeusen1091]

You’re so right. I’ve seen leetcode gods plateau quickly in environments they aren’t familiar with in new contexts

[@Astral100]

Agree about managers, agree about leetcode bullshit, disagree about skill not being an issue. Whether developers are good or bad can have a critical impact on the future maintenance of the project and sometimes can even determine whether the project ends up being success or a failure.

[@ggreatminds]

I think there are some devs which generate Nx output. However in teams this balances out and if they can communicate well they can raise the whole team's output. If they don't they usually bring the whole team's output down. And yeah leetcode does not test for this

[@zealousprogrammer4539]

I like your content in fact I've subscribed! - there are many 10x programmers out there, I would not bother to pay these two guys the salaries of ten devs we all have proof of theirs skills: Linus Torvalds and Ryan Dahl.

[@mudi2000a]

Thank you. Especially about the part of being a manager. I went through the same thing. It was not for dev but for an ops position but the manager part was really horrible and after that I decided to never want to be a manager again.

[@Od1th]

Intro is AMAZING! )))

[@ev3rybodygets177]

there is 100% a thing as a 10x programmer. They did 10x the work more than everyone else. He was insanely organized to the T and focused. Its not like our team were lazy either. He just figured shit out 10x faster. The dude also carried a laptop with him when he went everywhere and always had a notebook in his hands... He could never just turn it off and i would be miserable doing that but he seemed happy.

[@James-ry3bo]

Id argue we ran the experiment with John Carmack at Oculus post Facebook acquisition. His talent couldn't save the product from the corporate machine.

[@kharma1283]

I've interviewed a lot of people. I've quickly been able to understand, just with a conversation, if they know what they are doing or not. There hasn't been an ambiguity in my mind where I needed to give them a ridiculous quiz to resolve my doubts.

[@ZevsNP]

Great video, you're looking at the root cause, the only thing would be great to have unwanted pauses cut out instead of micro rewinds, they instill some kind of fear :D

[@stephanb.322]

Agree with most of what you said, but there definitely are 10x developers in corpo dev. Have met a few over my 25 years in software... It's usually those who know the existing code-base and maintain it (the stuff you mention you hate), know the architecture, frameworks and tools, patterns and customers/use-cases that are relevant by heart. And can implement a feature or fix a bug 10-100x faster and better due to that (usually highly proprietary) knowledge. But I've also met people who are 10x after a few weeks by going completely bananas learning that environment during their on-boarding, while the majority of people next to them are there for 2+ years and still fight the environment instead of learning it. If you haven't seen 10x devs in your jobs, it might be: (seen all of those) a) their hiring is total bs (what you mention), b) their turnover is crazy high and doesn't retain experienced people c) all the 10x-devs are over-employed or work 2 startups on the side, so the company is only getting 3x on their salary d) the job is 80% bs-meetings and nobody gets anything done.

[@glyakk]

When I played football I always heard the story of Vince Lombardi who took average players, or at least players that were not exceptional, and won champions with them. A good coach or manager will always out perform a bad manager regardless of the talent they have on the team.

[@OrkhanHuseynli]

Perfect content! Finally someone talks real

[@vd9570]

I have just enrolled in CSE (Computer Science Engineering) branch in a reputable college. Please guide me which books should I start referring not for coding but for strengthing the basics of computer science.

[@alttiakujarvi]

Now that's an INTRO!

[@alexamzim2606]

The best "manager" I've had was when I was an intern and my lead was not afraid to push back against his management. Later when a management position opened up he was not considered because he wasn't part of the "good ol boy" system.

[@maciejkarczewski9475]

Cool intro. Great content!

[@3._2xd0]

I love the intro

[@n0Corn330]

Great video. You mention not staying too long at companies. It would be great if you could elaborate on that and what your heuristic is for moving. I am staying at a job at the moment because of the optics and perception (I have spent between 12-18 months at 3 jobs for what I think are legitimate reasons) so that insight would be interesting. Also the manager IC dynamic and path is fascinating Id be curious as to why you think the incentives are stacked in such as the way you described. Subscribed!

[@matthewdouglas2373]

I love your presentation of nuance

[@jangelbrich7056]

"I have been a manager, but that was one of the most miserable times of my life" - let THAT sink it, and what this tells about management as a whole. It explains the for-ever mismatch between biz (driven by simple greed) and tech (driven by - guess what - tech curiosity). Very few people who can build a bridge between. It is miserable by design.

[@bigutubefan2738]

Thanks ever so much for starting this channel and making all these videos! It's incredibly valuable, for the whole industry, to hear from someone of your experience, and as articulate and thoughtful as yourself. Anyway, you make a great point about leetcode interviews. But do your criticisms apply equally to companies that also carry out System Design interviews? I wonder if some of the same best practises and approach to problem solving mentioned in your videos, are exactly what System Design interviewers are looking for. Or are these interviews just more expensive in terms of interviewer time, subjective, and no more reliable an indicator of a candidate's future productivity than anything else?

[@anttoni8867]

Great channel. Thanks for the content.

[@MaybeJustJames]

Scientific software developer here, It's really unfortunate that research code is throw away because it makes results hard to verify. This is something the research community has been spending many years trying to change

[@kyleleblancvlogs3820]

15:10 the talk on managers and management reminded me of the new fallout series. "It comes down to one word, management" 😄

[@gabrielescalante6482]

awesome videos man! It would be awesome if you did a video about some of the books you find valuable in you career as a software engineer.

[@scottfranco1962]

I call them "rubics cube" interviews, where the point is to solve relatively simple programming problems as fast as possible. It has virtually no bearing on if you can do the work, since, by definition, programming work is novel (otherwise companies would be just copying previous code). What it encourages is people going to web sites and practicing solving programming puzzles at speed. It works, but it doesn't teach real problem solving.

[@Efecretion]

I'm in that weird corner case of a tiny group that survived all the froth of other 'devs' here at my company. I do have an awesome position of being my own team and having hundreds of people using my programs (and loving them much more than what is available as standard provided by my company!). But for me it was really a passion project and I've spend probably more than 40 hours of overtime per week for more than 5 years now. I do not recommend it for most people.

[@eurixer]

Part 2 of n is such a software developer title

[@GeneraluStelaru]

My PM has a hands-off approach. We only speak when he wants to get or give feedback.

[@josevargas686]

A manager that treats you like an adult? Amazing, we need more of those.

[@nicolasjoulin3004]

George Hotz, who is by all account an amazing developer, did a very public one month internship at twitter right after its acquisition by Elon. Granted it was only one month but he really did not achieve much during that time. Whereas he is extremely productive otherwise.

[@cluebcke]

"I'm a 10x programmer" is "I'm an alpha male" for codebros

[@SsaliJonathan]

This guys has the best intro

[@scottfranco1962]

Your point is taken. We don't need 10x programmers, we need 10x managers. Linus didn't write Linux. It was written by a group. What made and what makes Linux work is Linus was a good manager. He says this himself. "I don't code anymore". He manages the process.

[@hoomodance]

There definitely are 10x and 0.1x developers. I agree that a leetcode interview won't help you identify them

[@AftercastGames]

I’m starting to get the picture that there are a lot more 0.1x developers, unfortunately. If you see someone write in 10 lines of code what could easily be done in 1, that qualifies, in my opinion. For example, if you see someone write a classic “for” loop, I consider that to be a red flag these days. Most languages have much better built in options, and if someone doesn’t know about them or doesn’t know when to use them, they are going to take 10x longer than they should.

[@levonschaftin3676]

@@AftercastGames lol

[@KayOScode]

@@AftercastGames nothing wrong with doing a classic for loop. As long as they’re not doing a while loop with an increment at the end for no good reason

[@Ben_Lloyd]

@@AftercastGames i feel as though if your biggest red flag is a for loop then you're looking way too low or 'little picture'. ill agree with your point that there are many 0.1x devs but the things they do aren't 10 lines, it's putting something together and not caring what the next dev is going to see when they read your code. it could be a few lines of something 'clever' or hundred of lines of something that requires immense effort to understand and make changes to. a real 10x dev might make only 1 line of code to do/fix something but, they should be making code that they know can be worked with easily again in the future.

[@drxyd]

@@AftercastGames What counts as "better" entirely depends on the context, depending on what you're working on even a triply nested for-loop could be the optimal solution. Rather than focusing on what abstractions a dev uses it's better to look at whether they have a sufficient variety of tools in their toolkit and if they can recognize the circumstances where those tools are best applied.

[@CallumBradbury]

I feel like productivity isn't the most important metric for a developer, and is arguably a harmful one to focus on. I think in the majority of cases you want developers who write clean, maintainable code, and that is a mindset not a skill or experience issue. If person A takes twice as long to implement something as person B, but that implementation is easier for other developers to understand, and fits into the architecture in a cleaner fashion, that extra time has reduced the overall chronic impact of that feature/bug fix/whatever going forwards. The amount of careless developers who can implement something quickly, and then leave others to deal with it for years to come, is astounding, and is something I see more frequently as time goes on. Its quality, not quantity, innit. Ideally your code speeds up other peoples work, not your own, then you're in a good place I think.

[@InternetOfBugs]

"Productivity" is vague, and we don't have (IMNSHO) good ways to measure the quality of a developer in any quantitative fashion. So it means different things to different people. That said, I HATE the phrase "Clean maintainable code" It's so ambiguous and has been part of so many vehement, pointless, time wasting arguments other the years, with people on both sides claiming their way was the "cleaner" way. In my opinion, arguing about code cleanliness, beauty and aesthetics has taken up more time that could possibly have been saved by implementing any given set of code cleanliness rules. I'm sure I'll end up with videos about that at some point, although at the moment they aren't at the top of my list.

[@CallumBradbury]

@@InternetOfBugs It is ambiguous for sure, and yeah I've seen (and been in) many discussions like that. It isn't about beauty, or aesthetics though, it's about the maintainability. As in the ability for someone to come in once the original developers have left, and understand/modify the code with minimal head scratching. That requires care, and empathy for those future devs, and I'd rank it top of the list of desired traits in a developer. Code can be taught, speed can be trained, but I think care is more a personality trait than anything else.

[@InternetOfBugs]

@@CallumBradbury How do you measure how "maintainable" a given codebase or code change is, though? How do you know what will or won't be understandable to the next dev? I'm not trying to imply it isn't important - just that most of the discussions I've seen on that topic have just led to disagreements. For example, I had a teammate who insisted that any method that was more than `n` lines long was too complicated and needed to be broken up (I don't remember what his `n` was - 20 or 30 maybe? - it's been a long time). For me, though, I'd rather have a longer method that linearly and clearly does a sequence of things that are easy to follow, and having to scroll or hit PageDown a few times is much better in my opinion than having to RightClick->GoToMethodDefinition (or the equivalent hot key) over and over and over again. Both of us thought our way was the more maintainable one.

[@CallumBradbury]

​@@InternetOfBugs Honestly I think the length of methods and stuff like that isn't the important stuff, that's not what makes it maintainable or understandable - not really. Anyone can understand a long method, and anyone can navigate through functions if they have to (though I also prefer the longer method in most cases). It's a bit trite to mention them, but I think the SOLID principles are a good start, as are unit tests. If a class can't be unit tested easily, it's probably an unmaintainable class, is my general philosophy (unless its dealing with a 3rd party API that doesn't have interfaces). Obviously you can go too far with that though, breaking down things too much, or even worse starting to religiously follow that 'TDD' plague that has been popping up everywhere lately. If you can write unit tests for a class, that means someone who wants to know how to use the class can look at the unit tests and they become their own form of documentation, one where the user can see what is supposed to happen when it's used in many different scenarios. They can see the edge cases, and when they modify the class they can check they haven't broken anything. I think the folk who say 'write the tests first' are insane, but I think at least writing the tests before committing the code is the best step towards a maintainable codebase, as it makes you think about not only what you're using it for *right now* but also the scenarios you might not have considered before throwing it into the repo for others to get their hands on. Does it take longer? Sure. Will less features get delivered? Absolutely. Will it save time in the long run? Probably, unless the project is a one-and-done throwaway thing. My background is .Net though, unit testing is pretty cohesive and advanced in the land of milk and honey, I don't really know what other languages do regarding that stuff.

[@gammalgris2497]

The biggest problem with "productivity" is that we have to deal with tradeoffs a lot and some consequences may cause more maintenance work later, some bugs will cost time, etc.. We cause additional work for ourselves or our colleagues in the future and we have to split our limited time working on new features and the other work. Being busy thus doesn't mean we're productive. Doing overtime to fix bad tradeoffs isn't being productive either. To fix errors which could have been avoided in the first place isn't productive.

[@AnimeLover-su7jh]

There are some edge cases, I believe Casey Muratori, Jonathan Blow, Sean Barrett and Fabian (ryg) Are easily 10x Developers. Watching Casey parsing PNG files while explaining it, was a crazy thing to me, That guy reads and explains and then code, faster than I would read the spec myself. (I am not really against having 10x developers, It always makes me want to be better than I am currently).

[@Longlius]

Jblow is definitely not a 10x developer. He codes a lot but produces relatively little finished product.

[@KowalskiDefi]

Would love to hear about your Manager experience and thoughts!

[@user-oj7uc8tw9r]

This man is giving me hope... :')

[@Najibway]

16:17 (about a few seconds ago) you mentioned about possibly talking more about why you didn’t enjoy being part of management. I’d like for you make a video about this topic. I think it’ll be interesting.

[@xxasifxx]

Imagine a company applies all this advice and is letting go of new hires regularly because even if the initial work output is promising, the frequency of pulls and results go downhill. Letting go of managers makes sense yeah? But when replacing management, communication between management and project team members becomes passive. And then technical leads take over management duties while still in an IC mindset. As the company culture collapses, wouldn't the company benefit in the short term if it hired using more technical interviews? The talent is already rushing out of an open wound, so a wave of ICs that can abide by acceptance criteria with little communication could help clot the wound.

[@TalhaMansoor]

Hey Carl, you mentioned you wrote a book and a blog in one of your previous videos. Could you please link it in your channel or video descriptions. I'm interested in checking it out. It's difficult to find online without the full name of the book or the author.

[@InternetOfBugs]

It's called "App Accomplished" It's 10 years old, and out of print. It will never be reprinted 'cause most tech books have a short shelf life. www.informit.com/store/app-accomplished-strategies-for-app-development-success-9780321961785 You can read the first chapter and ToC/Index for free here: ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321961785/samplepages/9780321961785.pdf if you want to.

[@TalhaMansoor]

@@InternetOfBugs Thanks and keep up the great work. Loving your videos.

[@julkiewicz]

Banger intro

[@ansidhe]

Dziękujemy.

[@InternetOfBugs]

You're very welcome. Thank you. I appreciate it.

[@techmansion8618]

Sir what are your thoughts on the data engineering (ETL) field ...

[@Skiamakhos]

Quiet cutting is a thing - where employees get shuffled off into roles they hate, don't get inflationary pay rises so they're making less each year for the same job, get told they need to do extra to the job to make the same money, they burn out, end up working down to their shitty pay, start believing the narrative that they're useless, can't quit because now they believe they're just shitty programmers, and it becomes a kind of evil Pygmalion effect. They expect to be penalised for doing ok, and they expect all companies to just treat them like shit.

[@hs3881]

The idea of 10x developer is what you get when you pair ignorance and greed.

[@yiuminghuynh5252]

re: Managers, I actually think you already found your first criteria for a good manager... If the manager holds themselves accountable on their own without being prompted, they're probably going to be a good manager.

[@raghavkhandelwal8357]

Amazing vid!! Can you do a video where you suggest some books on programming ? Since, you have read a ton.

[@jimmiejohnsson2272]

Definitely a lot of over reliance on code tests and IQ-like test out there. I’ve never meet someone who lacked the skills to write good code, it usually is more to do with personality. If someone is passionate about coding and actively wants to continue learning how to do things better then that will probably be a good software engineer. That and the ability to finish projects. Leetcode is truely where the soul of devs goes to die, solve this arbitrary problem for the sake of solving it.

[@andersbodin1551]

I am a 10x programmer, I just procrastinate 90% of the time 😢

[@realkoryheard]

Is your shirt both Texas and the swift programming language?

[@InternetOfBugs]

Yes, it's the logo of the Austin TX Swift Language Meetup. Sadly, now defunct (like with a lot of meetups since the pandemic).

[@Heater-v1.0.0]

I have been wondering about what has been going on with interviewing for 10 or twenty years now. I have not been interviewed in that extreme technical detail way ever. As a young noob to programming nobody expected great skills in this language or that, or this OS or that, or anything. They understood you were new to the game, interviews would be discussions about what was studied in school/uni, about outside hobbies and interests, importantly describing what they were building and how I might fit in. Oh and it was expected the company would provide training for the boring details like programming languages and such or time on the job was available. In later years interviews were more about where I had been working, on what and what did I do there. Later still, people in the industry that knew me would use call and ask if I was available, the interview was just a formality.

[@soundrightmusic]

I always say hire people not skill sets. Obviously there is a baseline of skill. But the right group of people will always outperform the super team over time.

[@djinn666]

Is quite easy to be the 10x developer, just go to a company that hires bad developers. There are people who take 10x longer to fix a bug because they don't understand programming at a level that allows them to fix the bug. If you don't know gdb, then you can only print statement debug and try random things until it worked. The amount of "developers" who managed to get by that way is mind boggling.