A "10x programmer" is, I think, a kind of goofy term.
In 26 years working at Apple, I can think of a dozen or so engineers that were remarkably capable, prolific, able to hold an entire code stack and all its esoteric nuances in their head, could handily see how to refactor an entire framework, or replace several frameworks with one.
I don't know if I would call them 10x programmers though — as I understand how the term is being used.
But I can think of two, maybe three engineers that I would say were so far above everyone else in ability that I absolutely would call them 10x programmers. They were seemingly able to additionally hold in their head the working of the processor, its registers, the idiosyncrasies of the compiler and linker, how the low-level file manager and thread managers work.... It was clear to me that they just think differently.
I recall a bug that I wrestled with for days (and other coworkers were stymied as well). Out of desperation I asked a 10x-er and the bug was resolved in 5 minutes. Remarkable. I even asked him how he saw the problem so quickly but even his answer was gave me no comfort. It was, as I say, clear that I just didn't think that way.
> I recall a bug that I wrestled with for days (and other coworkers were stymied as well). Out of desperation I asked a 10x-er and the bug was resolved in 5 minutes. Remarkable. I even asked him how he saw the problem so quickly but even his answer was gave me no comfort. It was, as I say, clear that I just didn't think that way.
I never understood how normal people program. I have an extremely good long term memory and my intuition somehow internalizes every codebase I see so it just tells me what could be wrong and then I fix it. So every time I come into a new team there are stuff others have struggled with for a long time, and I just go and solve them, people with way more experience and have been there fore years, doesn't really matter, they don't see it.
I have many other mental issues so I am not really a 10x employee, but the gap in how fast people can reason about technical problems is extremely huge. I've worked on one of the more important teams at Google, there were a couple of extremely good engineers there, but most were just normal hard working people, the gap is huge even there.
The ability to pay attention on a specific thing for more than a few seconds doesn't feel "natural" to me. Evolution does not favor long-term attention for anyone who is not a top-predator. Imagine a deer paying too much attention to grass It's eating and not able to be distracted by the slightest of the noise a predator may make is not going to reproduce. We, humans, are close to top-predators, so, maybe! I've not thought about it too deeply. But I still feel that the ability to focus for a long time is a bug, not a feature in the natural environment. The economic system has turned into a must-have feature and lack of it a bug that is to be cured by medicine. I wonder if early pioneers (not the sciency/nerdy kind) all had ADHD?
I can't pay attention to anything at all, its all reactive. You can get through college that way, just memorize and build intuition for everything, no need to work for that, but after college I couldn't do shit since nobody pays you for just knowing things, so got an ADHD diagnosis, got pills.
Without I can't even read a single line of text without losing focus, I just read fragments. Then when I got pills after college everything became super easy. My intuition was already an expert at reverse engineering technical facts from fragments of documentation, so when I suddenly could sit and realisably read things for hours everything just clicked. Maybe that came with the ADHD or the other way around, I don't think it is entirely free.
There’s also a correlation with childhood trauma and attachment.
Grew up in mostly harmonious and safe environment? Better focus and easy control over attention.
Unsafe, startling environment demanding a deer-like constant awareness and adaptation? Less control over more scattered attention habits and the related issues with memory.
Like... debugging? Following the code process and seeing where it breaks? I'm a little unclear, are you saying you don't do debugging, but rather when you see a bug you mentally run through the entire process and know exactly where the bug is... even in a new codebase?
If you wanna experience the other way around, work with normal people using computers.
They usually struggle and get by through habits but they understand nothing (which is normal, computers are anti-pedagogic), while developers can see through the fabric. Things that are obvious for us are non existant or merely a huge stack of blurry artefacts with no clear order.
In 26 years working at Apple, I can think of a dozen or so engineers that were remarkably capable, prolific, able to hold an entire code stack and all its esoteric nuances in their head, could handily see how to refactor an entire framework, or replace several frameworks with one.
I don't know if I would call them 10x programmers though — as I understand how the term is being used.
But I can think of two, maybe three engineers that I would say were so far above everyone else in ability that I absolutely would call them 10x programmers. They were seemingly able to additionally hold in their head the working of the processor, its registers, the idiosyncrasies of the compiler and linker, how the low-level file manager and thread managers work.... It was clear to me that they just think differently.
I recall a bug that I wrestled with for days (and other coworkers were stymied as well). Out of desperation I asked a 10x-er and the bug was resolved in 5 minutes. Remarkable. I even asked him how he saw the problem so quickly but even his answer was gave me no comfort. It was, as I say, clear that I just didn't think that way.