It has always been obvious to me that 10x programmers exist and I've been bemused by the backlash against the idea of the 10x programmer.
I've worked with two different people whom I would consider 10x programmers and I might even go so far as to say they were 100x or even infinityx programmers because they just created solutions that a team of normal programmers wouldn't be able to come up with even if they were given the rest of their lives.
Similarly, 10x people exist in other fields.
For example, there was outrage at Fusion (a journalism outlet) in 2017 when it was revealed that Felix Salmon was being paid $400,000 as a financial journalist, whereas other journalists at Fusion were being paid $60-80,000.
People made comments like "Fusion could have hired four Harvard graduates with degrees in Economics for the money that they're paying Felix" -- but neglected to consider the fact that Felix Salmon has such a profound grasp on the way markets work and is such an original, grounded, intuitive, and counter-intuitive thinker that you could not replace him with ten thousand Harvard graduates. He simply has singular insight.
I've worked with two different people whom I would consider 10x programmers and I might even go so far as to say they were 100x or even infinityx programmers because they just created solutions that a team of normal programmers wouldn't be able to come up with even if they were given the rest of their lives.
Similarly, 10x people exist in other fields.
For example, there was outrage at Fusion (a journalism outlet) in 2017 when it was revealed that Felix Salmon was being paid $400,000 as a financial journalist, whereas other journalists at Fusion were being paid $60-80,000.
People made comments like "Fusion could have hired four Harvard graduates with degrees in Economics for the money that they're paying Felix" -- but neglected to consider the fact that Felix Salmon has such a profound grasp on the way markets work and is such an original, grounded, intuitive, and counter-intuitive thinker that you could not replace him with ten thousand Harvard graduates. He simply has singular insight.