A 10x programmer doesn't cost 10 times as much as a regular programmer. 10x programmers are real and drive real business value. The people who insist 10x programmers are a myth simply have not worked with one. Do not conflate brilliant-but-an-asshole or prodigious-output-but-creates-a-mess programmers with 10x programmers.
> that uses the phrase 10x but does not provide any way to quantify it
Understand your complaint but "10x" is best interpreted as a figure-of-speech and not an exact mathematical equation. It's just a short & snappy sounding label that's easy-to-say and easy-to-type on the keyboard. (My previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13753178)
We use numerical type phrases without quantitative precision all the time:
- He doubled-down on his opinion. (We don't nitpick and ask how can an opinion be quantitatively measured as 2x?)
- The old editors like vi/emacs is a million times better than IDEs. (We don't nitpick about where the 10^6 quantity improvement comes from.)
And yesterday, the top comment[1] in "Economics Programming Languages" wrote:
- >a new language to be adopted it needs to do something (something reasonably important) 10x better than the competition. Even 2x better is not enough to motivate the disruption of changing languages.
Yes, it's hard to measure "10x" in languages beyond synthetic benchmarks. But I think most of us get the idea that "10x" is a just a synonym for "a massive amount" of a fuzzy quality.
For some reason, "10x" attracts a lot of extra nitpicking that we don't consistently apply to many other examples ("double-down", "million times", etc).
Most of your examples are commonly used phrases. "10x programmer" is a unique phrase. We don't hear "10x electrical engineer" or "10x politician".
Phrases like "decimate", double-down, etc are part of the English language, and is well understood to have multiple meanings.
Your other examples (e.g. vi/emacs being a million times better) are examples of random numbers people throw out. Someone will say vi/emacs is a ton better, or an order of magnitude better, or a million times better. Whereas with 10x, it's always 10x. I don't hear people talk about 3x programmers or 20x programmers.
The HN comment actually supports my point. You can see how different people are interpreting 10x in the responses. That's the exact same problem we have in this comment thread.
Yes, and "10x" is itself also becoming a commonly used phrase that's getting less tied to the math number 10. This thread's extensive non-quantitative usage from many people is evidence of that. (I'm guessing that in a few decades, the bikeshedding about "10x" will eventually stop and it will be accepted as a non-numerical description like "a million times better")
>We don't hear "10x electrical engineer" or "10x politician".
The "10x" is relatively new compared to "double-down" but it's spreading out to other uses besides "10x programmer":
- "10x programming language" : yesterday's HN thread comment example
Why do all the above non-mathematical usages keep happening? Probably because "10x" sounds cool. We're witnessing language evolution as it happens.
>Whereas with 10x, it's always 10x. I don't hear people talk about 3x programmers or 20x programmers.
Sometimes people talk about 100x and 1000x and infinityX to try and emphasize extra rare skills etc. Again, interpreting 1000x literally as 10^3 isn't the intended meaning. And to build on your point... the fact that nobody says "9x programmer" or "11x programmer" but almost always "10x" is actually evidence that it's not trying to communicate exact mathematics.
> This thread's extensive non-quantitative usage from many people is evidence of that.
Even putting aside comments like mine complaining about the actual number, this thread's extensive use of 10x to mean as many different things is a good reason to avoid the term altogether. The whole thread is just "10x programmers don't exist because X" and "10x programmers exist because Y", where X and Y are unrelated.
> "10x manager"
All but one of the links in the first page were in the context of SW, or written by people in the SW industry. Many of them explicitly pointed out they derived the phrase from 10x developer.
>10x to mean as many different things is a good reason to avoid the term altogether. The whole thread is just "10x programmers don't exist because X" and "10x programmers exist because Y", where X and Y are unrelated.
Yes, I understand your complaint here too but the various X-Y meanings isn't really the fault of "10x"... it's caused by any label. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797871
E.g. the alternative word "expert" or "effective" such as "effective programmer" would cause the same debates:
- I think an effective programmer is one who understand the whole stack from hardware gates to web stack
- No I think a truly effective programmer is one who empowers his team members.
- No an "effective programmer" is really X. No it's Y.
- <... ad infinitum disagreements ... >
It doesn't matter what the word is... "10x", "talented", "expert", "master", etc. There's no consensus definition and yet we haven't tried to eliminate those words.
Generally, I understand that people typically mean "10x" as a synonym for "massively better". (Because nobody who says "10x" has a stopwatch and rigorous academic studies measuring it.) And yes, the counterargument is "10 doesn't really mean anything" ... that's true but the "'massively better'" also doesn't really mean anything -- and yet we can't strike "massively better" from our language so we're back to the same issue.
There is no short label X that "really means" whatever everybody agrees it to mean. That's human language. We muddle onward regardless.
The author of that book, Sean M. Platt, is not a tech guy nor a programmer. He's a high-school dropout that started writing articles and stories. Now, he's mostly a publisher.
The interesting thing is that somehow, the "10x programmer" meme made its way to a non-programmer and he adopted it as "10x author".
The problem is value and productivity in software (or any creative space) is hard to quantify in general. How much better is the best engineer you’ve worked with compared to the worst? 2x? 1.5x? How do you quantify that? But you know one is significantly better than the other I assume.
If you want to replace 10x with “much much better”, then ok. But the general idea is the same. Some engineers produce an outsized impact compared to their peers.
While in absolute terms it's not any more ok to spy on adults than children, the idea of spying on children being more morally repugnant is based around the idea of children as innocent and by spying on then we're depriving them of that and allowing malicious actors to prey on that innocence (hey, now someone knows where this child will be, when, and most of the important things happening in their life; much easier to trick.)
In reality the same arguments apply to adults, but we find it less morally repugnant because adults aren't innocent and are expected to gaurd themselves against such actions. However, it becomes more and more difficult to guard against.
> While in absolute terms it's not any more ok to spy on adults than children, the idea of spying on children being more morally repugnant is based around the idea of children as innocent and by spying on then we're depriving them of that and allowing malicious actors to prey on that innocence (hey, now someone knows where this child will be, when, and most of the important things happening in their life; much easier to trick.)
This seems like a very mushy reason. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that children are not considered able to knowingly consent to many things - including contracts such as EULAs or TOS. Given this, a child is also not expected to be able make a reasoned decision about privacy tradeoffs.
The reason it's "ok" to spy on adults is that they can make an educated decision about whether they're ok with being spied on. I don't necessarily agree that this is true in practice, but I think that's the theory.
I think it does elicit the feeling of disgust, but most people don't know it's happening. (Or downplay the risks - such claiming that it's only machines and not people watching).
It should also be completely illegal, but the justice system can't keep up with technology. Imagine you found out that your next door neighbor has drilled a hole through the wall and fed a camera into your house - what do you do? (Call the police, certainly). Is it really any different when the camera feed isn't a physical wire but done over the internet?
Because with kids it's much more obviously evil thing to do. For adults one can perhaps argue that they (being adults) can choose for themselves whether to give or not to give the permissions - just like with everything else in their life, it's their responsibility to know better. Kids can't really be expected to make informed decisions on actions that are potentially dangerous, they need to be protected by adults.
> For adults one can perhaps argue that they (being adults) can choose for themselves whether to give or not to give the permissions
That's wishful thinking. Most people can't tell the WWW from Facebook. People are so bad at writing emails that there are Workshops for Composing E-Mails which sell out quickly. Many disable SIM PINs because they forget them or don't want to bother remembering them. The people who read permissions an app requests make such a little percentage of smartphone users that they can't even be considered a minority.
I beleive we need some kind of CE for software. It's easier to make sure that your parmigiano reggiano comes from Emilia-Romagna that it is to make sure that you can rely on a certain online service provider / platform. That's simply unacceptable.
And they'd rather not care. A life where we had to make sure every single thing we have and every tiny peg or thing in them is of a certain quality would be hell. Have you read "I, pencil"? I suggest it becomes compulsory reading to every single person. Things involve lots of other things and all we have is some governmental and international bodies helping us have some trust in what we possess.
We generally believe that sexual exploitation of children is worse than of an adult. We don’t allow for consensual sexual relations, creation or mere posesion of explicit material with a child.
In fact drawings of said material can get you in a lot of trouble in many, liberal, countries.
That being said, I hate what the internet has become.
They can pirate it too, which is often a superior user experience in that the user can keep the file, move it to a different device, watch without arcane restrictions, etc.
"Learn about our efforts to prevent climate change, protect natural resources, and keep harmful toxins out of the ecosystem."
If they were really so concerned about the environment, they wouldn't push for new models year after year, but instead focus more on better software. Also they wouldn't hype their new models as "must haves" like they do now.
>If they were really so concerned about the environment, they wouldn't push for new models year after year, but instead focus more on better software. Also they wouldn't hype their new models as "must haves" like they do now.
They're more concerned about profits and selling units instead of "the stuff you've got is good enough".
