I think this whole 10x thing goes back to Steve McConnell's book Rapid Development (published in 1996). He popularized this idea in mentioning some research that suggested that top developers could outperform average developers by as much as 10 times (by some measure of productivity).
I have no idea whether research into software engineering still backs up this claim or not. Certainly there are super talented people out there, and they can seem a bit magical at times. As an example of someone I know, I consider @mortoray
to be such a person.
However, I am pretty confident that ascribing all these weird traits to "10x" developers is both wrong and unhelpful. The only context in which I can think of it being at all useful is where you might not consider hiring someone with asperger's syndrome because they don't interview very well. They could have useful skills and talents, but they'd need the right support system to succeed. However, looking specifically for traits like poor communication as if they were the core indicators of programming ability would be much more likely to filter out good candidates than to identify them.
The origin goes back way farther, 1968, and the testing condition were controversial even back then. People have tried to repeat similar experiments but the results are always debatable because of two major sticking points:
What quantitative measures are being used to measure productivity?
I think this whole 10x thing goes back to Steve McConnell's book Rapid Development (published in 1996). He popularized this idea in mentioning some research that suggested that top developers could outperform average developers by as much as 10 times (by some measure of productivity).
I have no idea whether research into software engineering still backs up this claim or not. Certainly there are super talented people out there, and they can seem a bit magical at times. As an example of someone I know, I consider @mortoray to be such a person.
However, I am pretty confident that ascribing all these weird traits to "10x" developers is both wrong and unhelpful. The only context in which I can think of it being at all useful is where you might not consider hiring someone with asperger's syndrome because they don't interview very well. They could have useful skills and talents, but they'd need the right support system to succeed. However, looking specifically for traits like poor communication as if they were the core indicators of programming ability would be much more likely to filter out good candidates than to identify them.
Thanks for providing the origin of the term. Really interesting!
The origin goes back way farther, 1968, and the testing condition were controversial even back then. People have tried to repeat similar experiments but the results are always debatable because of two major sticking points:
I looked into this a while back and wrote up a post about it: codingblocks.net/practice/four-rea...