A "10X Developer" is someone that sucks a little less than most devs.

I'm a 10X dev, and I can prove it:

XXXXXXXXXX

A 10X developer is probably someone that steams forward leaving shite in their wake, causing other people to clean up after them, thus slowing them down and speeding themselves sup, and giving themselves an appearance of working much faster to stakeholders whilst in reality they slow product development.

Or they're legit.

Actually, I do remember the underlying study, and you need to read it properly. The 10X difference was measured from best to worst. However, the median was already 5X!

So that measure, the average dev is a 5X dev. That means that the best dev was twice as productive as the average dev, and that's hardly inconceivable.

Yeah, like 10 less decibels.

@Fast-Nop Which means the worst developers are only 20% as productive as a "normal" dev.

@Fast-Nop Precisely. This is what happens when marketing guys and clickbait queens get their hands on a study, don't read it properly, and start creating a non-existent trend.

Is there a 10x difference between the absolute best and absolute worst devs? Definitely, if not more so. Are there devs who can consistently churn out 10x the performance of a single, average, yet also decent dev? Almost certainly not, but I'm not aware of any study that's claimed that's the case.

@deadlyRants Yeah, and that's also something you can see. There are even some where it would be better if they didn't do anything because their net contribution is damaging.

To be a 10X developer you just have to find, have, or get the right coworkers...

@craig939393 I've met that kind on more than one occasion

@formatc the strange thing is most devs on the team don't even realise what is happening :( there is a guy in my office - sound guy- he makes 5x more commits than anyone but is puts 100% of his code on controllers (asp .net), violates all solid, principle of least knowledge, clean code, desperation of concerns, and no tests. Even anaemic domain models. He thinks he's doing a good job and most other devs on the team would agree.

This looks good today, but eventually a tipping point will be reached where the project is too low quality to keep going at a good pace.

@craig939393 He's doing a good job. He's delivering business value. By the time the project gets too complex it will be time to re-architect to latest tech-trend anyway.

@Nihil75 absolutely not true. You can write code that doesn't care about the technology if you want to. Language - yes.

And for sale of argument, even if that's the case and it only lasts 5 years, that's far beyond the tipping point.

@Nihil75 for example I just finished spending 2 weeks pairing with every team member to find out how everyone is working. Every team member has no idea what they're looking at and spends half the time on the ticket reverse engineering code and then trying to find out why it's even like that (often no one knows) before they can do any new development.

@dontknowshit don't think so! Don't think anyone I work with would be an arse like you described in one of your rants - the query param guy.

And yes sausage fingers xD

How does a Triple X developer get represented on the suckyness ladder?