Myth of the 10x Developer: Technical Interviews are Broken, (part 2 of n)

One of the reasons the code-test LeetCode HackerRank style interview process started was because of the myth that there were 10x developers, and that, by interviewing well, you could fill your big tech company with just those top performers.

And that's how we got here.

And, chances are, most companies will stay here.

But, if your company interviews differently, then in my experience, you can get a huge productivity advantage.

00:00 Video Intro
00:20 Channel Intro
00:34 Categories of programmers for our purposes
04:16 The Original. Flawed, 1960s Experiment
06:00 A few truths underlying the myth
07:48 Context for the argument in the video
08:29 My argument against 10x developers in corp settings
09:49 Not a skill issue, and not something LeetCode can detect
12:00 What LeetCode might select for at many companies
13:03 The advantage companies can have without LeetCode
14:21 A better focus, according to me, not that it will matter
16:03 This one neat trick for better productivity
17:28 Back full circle to where we started

Links from the video:
The Mythical Man Month:
Great book - highly recommended. I didn't talk much about it in this video, but i'm sure it will come up in the future.

Original Paper that used toy programs to invent the 10x myth:

Modern paper dispelling the 10x myth:

[jetfaker]

As a 0.3x developer im relieved to hear people aren't really over 30x better than me.

[mrunix]

If 10x developers are a myth how did I become one? It takes 10 developers to fix my garbage

[asplodr]

"Managers as a whole almost never want to create or be part of a process that holds managers responsible for anything."
Preach.

[Pherecydes]

If I were a 10x developer I'd split my productivity up between 10 jobs and collect 10 salaries.

[kumquats-inc]

According to the Coding War Games study in Peopleware, they really did find a 10x difference in productivity, i.e., some individuals got their task done 10x faster than others. The catch? They had actually measured that there was a 10x difference between organizations, not people. Within an organization, the average difference was about 20%. Your guess at 9:23 was spot on.

Quote:
"This is more than a little unsettling. Managers for years have affected a certain fatalism about individual differences. They reasoned that the differences were innate, so you couldn’t do much about them. It’s harder to be fatalistic about the clustering effect. Some companies are doing a lot worse than others. Something about their environment and corporate culture is failing to attract and keep good people or is making it impossible for even good people to work effectively."

[geedad]

How do you only have 26k subscribers? Ive been in tech 20 yrs including senior leadership roles and I am so glad to find someone I agree with on many things and I can still learn from. Will be following along with you here. Thanks for sharing.

[jarvs]

3:15 "The guy that wrote Linux" is definitly one of the possible descriptions of Linus xD

[scotterd]

"When companies say that the Leetcode interview process is very very important and that they want to make sure that they go through that process because it makes for employees that perform better, I think that what they're actually saying is 'Our managers are really bad and our environment is miserable and we're trying to select for people with a temperament to perform well even when they're miserable'" So well said.

[steveoc]

I think 10x devs exist - except that like everyone else, they operate in 0.2x mode for most of the time, then hit 10x during bursts of unusual creativity that may stretch for a few days.
 
We have developed Agile and constant meetings as a sure fire method to make sure nobody can get creative anymore and fly off to 10x land.

[emyrulz]

You touched on the essential point that most people simply do not perform at their best (they stumble on every pothole in the road) whereas the fast and productive people seem to magically not do that. I agree that management contributes to this a lot but more of it to me seems to simply be a familiarity issue. We tend to forget that a lot of software, tools, techniques and "best practices" are kind of ad-hoc, change all the time and are not very well synthetized. This means that if you happen to think like the person who wrote the system/library/architecture/whatever, you will simply fly over all the bumps and potholes whereas if you are unlucky and you happen to think in a somewhat orthogonal way, you will hit all the snags. Because boy oh boy there are tons of them! This also compounds and builds momentum over time until you are either a superstar (everyone cheers you from you early successes) or a failure (everyone puts you down more and more reinforced by your past failures).

[absurd]

Keep going! Love hearing old school code guys being real. constant W takes

[alrightsquinky]

If I were a 10x developer, I’d say “It’s 10xing time” and 10x all over the place.

[alexaneals]

I fall into a separate category of programmers. I am generally brought in to troubleshoot and modify existing legacy apps. So, I am more of maintenance programmer than building out new apps. It's a lot harder to track performance since it depends on the bug (issue) and it's complexity. Some bugs are easy squash and others take time to track down.

[ITNoetic]

Two of the companies I applied for jobs at over the past year have since closed down. I actually interviewed at one of them. I failed the interview due to not knowing the answer to a single trivia question about lock free and wait free in C++, which I'd never used nor heard of. I wasn't happy when I searched about it later and, after about 20 seconds of reading a blurb on it, understood the concept well enough to teach a class on it (basically, a technique for allowing shared resource access among multiple threads without using mutexes or locks by having each thread access the resource from some managed offset).

In that same interview loop, one of the interviewers bragged about how one of their recs had been open for over 2 years with no hire (graphics engineer).

[red_gandalf_chegando_atrasado]

I also took a paycut and came back to be an individual contributor. That was the smartest decision I've made in my carreer. For the same reasons that you mentioned: I don't have the temperament to be a manager, I have nightmares with "managing up" and care too much about people underneath me.

[mikem]

As a software engineer in their second year in a corporate environment, your videos have been really helpful. Keep it up!

[mtsurov]

Excellent material. Appreciate you putting this together. So far this channel has been a gem.

[bawbak]

From my experience, those 10x (or more productive) developers in companies are the ones that they try harder to prove themselves to others.
And in fact, they are just the louder people and shout any small thing that they do that will cause managers will see them more compare to the others.
Unfortunately, I was one of those and couldn't believe how much easier my job became when I just tried to be louder than others and how others that even I knew that they had done a lot more than me, but my manager was telling me that they're not working good enough.
And usually more (real) experienced developers are the ones who know a lot and can do a lot, but they choose to not do that, and instead spend more of their energy and their time on their personal life and goal, not for the company.

[nkbdl]

Thank you Carl. I felt every line of yours are facts and based on experiences. And I felt I learned a lot and filled in the gaps especially the doubts I had while I worked on my job as a manager. Good managers are hard to come by. And as you said, small company managers are a job easier to do vs big corporate. Just because there are distinct skill set to work as as a manager.

I loved your take on 10x. It kind of answered why a team of mine used to fail at a product and needed an outsider to help and that dude would come and did it in a week. I know exactly what you meant and that isn't 10x it is just a comparison.

Amazing vids keep it up! :)

[papayaspice]

15:42 "The times that I was a manager were some of the most very miserable times of my life" - this is super relatable. Please do speak about it in a future video!