1) Knowledge is entirely linear. If there some tasks programmer A fails at and some tasks programmer B fails at, then all you have is an apples-to-oranges comparison (which is what a lot of the x10 chest-pounding comes down to).
2) Knowledge isn't shared in the group. My proudest moments have involved actually teaching my co-workers how to write a recursive descent parser, why ACID matters in databases or how to divide a multi-threaded application between worker and consumer threads. It might be true that if I'd just kept my knowledge to my self and laughed as they failed, I might have been a 10x or even a 100x programmer. But it was more pleasant and satisfying to be the guy who actually helped everyone.
1) Knowledge is entirely linear. If there some tasks programmer A fails at and some tasks programmer B fails at, then all you have is an apples-to-oranges comparison (which is what a lot of the x10 chest-pounding comes down to).
2) Knowledge isn't shared in the group. My proudest moments have involved actually teaching my co-workers how to write a recursive descent parser, why ACID matters in databases or how to divide a multi-threaded application between worker and consumer threads. It might be true that if I'd just kept my knowledge to my self and laughed as they failed, I might have been a 10x or even a 100x programmer. But it was more pleasant and satisfying to be the guy who actually helped everyone.