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Discussion on: What is a "10x" Programmer?

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Petr Gladkikh • Edited

That "10x" became so annoying. Is this sustainable "10x"? How "10" is supposed to be measured? Anyway "10x" is highly contextual. In long running project it would be like "3x" at best (and 3x over 2 year project is a lot, mind you). For green field it may well be "10x" but then will you consider amount of technical debt the project then or instead praise that 10x-er for good job so he moves on to next hyperachievent and ask other folks to clean unicorn's poo?
Other parts of context are how team fits together, whether people are familiar with tools, how complicated is communication (if you own whole project - it's faster, if you have to coordinate many teams it takes time no matter now 10x your developers are), whether engineers solving right problem or just churning code that is destined to be abandoned, and handful of other reasons.