When I saw the title, I thought “just another blog on 10x developer”. I don’t really know why I decided to read on, but I’m happy I did. Searls touches on many more while investigating the topic. The writer approaches the topic from a inter-generational point of view and also goes in to things like “passion” and “craftsmanship”. I would even say, this is not about the 10x developer at all. This is about how as a young engineering discipline we are still trying to find better ways of doing things.
It’s an open secret that the industry has no idea how to teach people to program. Computer Science degrees famously don’t prepare programmers for the job of programming, which has always been left as an exercise to the student to figure out on their own time. If the industry is going to outlive us enthusiast programmers, will it adopt a sustainable approach to educating the next generation that doesn’t require people to teach themselves everything?
I’m glad I saw this comment because I was also about to skip it, but found the article to be a worthwhile read as well. Thanks for sharing it.
This was a very great article to read whose title does not make justice to the content.
I think I kind of dislike the generalization on generation. To me recently there are simply a lot more people that see programming as a job and not as much as a passion.
I learnt programming as a scientific activity and not as a productive one. So this was driven by creativity. And many in my promotion shared these values. But even in my time, many were just interested in the job. And of course, these people were not as effective. They were mediocre in comparison to people programming in their free time.
And yes, there is probably a lot more people like this today, in particular in younger generation. But there are still a lot of people programming for fun in their free time in the latest generation. This is just, they are now hidden by the majority of more “normal” people. Because let’s face it. Attitude of people programming during the week-end for super long hours while still programming for work during the week is not sane and abnormal.
Edit: a big missing part is that passionate dev are not necessarily what company prefer. Because yes, they can do incredible work. But quite often I see company prefer to have few of them and a bunch of more mediocre but reliable developers.
I think I kind of dislike the generalization on generation.
There’s a lot of pitfalls in that direction… but there’s also no denying that there’s an entire generation of people who grew up equating using computers with programming computers.
Our Apple IIs and C64s booted into BASIC. That was the interface you learned. Just using the computer literally involved programming, even if it was tangential. My grade school “computer class” where we learned how to use a computer, was focused on programming the turtle to move around the screen with LOGO. I remember a time when “repeat” was the longest word I knew how to spell because of that class.
Basically, you have to go out of your way to learn how to program today, involving downloading specialized software etc. In the 80s, you were ankle deep in programming just by turning the computer on.
Fully agree with what you said. There are still just as many passionate people fascinated by computers in the youngest generation as there are in older generations. It’s just that the sheer number of programmers has made them less visible in recent years.
Also, one thing the article misses is that programming 8 hours a day and then continuing to program in your spare time is not healthy for many people. People are different, and there are some who can do it without negative consequences, but for others it can lead to burnout, especially if they also have a family to take care of or other issues to deal with. I used to do a lot of programming in my spare time when I was in college. Now that I have a 40-hour-a-week job, I’ve learned that I need to be careful how much energy I spend, and I don’t do as much open source work because I need a lot of my free time to rest and recharge.
Fantastic read. I saw some of myself in there for sure.
there was a specific, generational moment that attracted a bunch of people like me into the software industry. It occurred during the brief window between home computers becoming widely available and their becoming sealed airtight by platform holders. For a fleeting moment, computers were simultaneously accessible and scrutable during a necessary but temporary stage in the maturation of information technology.
I mean damn.
I thought it was a good article. Well-written and reasonably well-argued. That said, I think that he missed a couple of things. I had a whole wall of text in preparation for my own blog post, but during the edit it really came down to a couple of things.
I think the industry’s obsession with 10x programmers is really about the quest and desire for mastery. Mastery is something that exists in any field, so that means we can look to history for comparisons.
He argues that mastery is disappearing. My opinion is that what he’s really seeing is the normal lifecycle of any industry that leads to less dependence on mastery.
Everything from furniture making to mechanical work has gone through the cycle. People doing what they need out of necessity, people getting good enough to offer their services on the market, masters arising from the truly dedicated and/or obsessed, shops run by masters to increase output by using the labour of apprentices and journeymen (and budding masters), and, finally, factories.
The difference between a master’s shop and a factory is critically important. In a master’s shop, everyone is gaining skill in the profession with mastery always possible to achieve for anyone with the right combination of desire and talent. In a factory, tasks are broken down into their component parts so that mere repetition and maybe some automation is enough to make extract masterful work from the process instead of depending on individual mastery.
Your local mechanic’s shop, especially if it’s a dealer shop, has more in common with a factory than a master’s shop. A race team is where you’re more likely to see a master’s shop in operation.
I think that what we are seeing is the transition from masters’ shops to factories.
There are still passionate people becoming master mechanics or furniture makers. I think the same is true of 10x programmers. But the tools some of those master programmers build will help everyone else do higher quality work and the processes they develop will eventually enable the extraction of masterful products from well-engineered processes executed by low-skilled people and, of course, automation in the form of AI.
For me, the main takeaway is ‘programmers nowadays seem to have a life and we need to adapt to that’. Well, it’s a good thing when people have something except for their work, I think. It feels like this is going to slow down the industry a bit, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Besides, we’re getting better and better tools, the AI is on the rise, so maybe we will be able to be as productive as before while not investing so much time.
As a side note, I feel like I don’t belong to the ‘passionate’ generation the author refers to, but even then I am curious enough to sometimes dig into the problem. I’d even go to a stretch to say that it’s not a passion for computers and programming that discerns good programmers but curiosity, and it is more often can be seen in very different people and is less destructive as a personal trait, I believe.
Let’s face it it’s going to be muchh harder to “get a life” with programming productivity tools instead of just giving extra revenue to whatever corporation you’re working for.
I hope we’re going to have the corporation eat it and stop squeezing every last drop out of devs. But that is yet to be seen and isn’t certain, unfortunately
Learning everything the hard way has made me a natural consultant and mentor. Because I’ve already explored all the wrong paths, I often know someone is stuck before they do, understand what threw them off course, and show them how to get back on track
This really hits home and is something I simply don’t see often in juniors today - a desire to tinker, experiment or ‘play’ to figure out how a problem might be solved. I’m always telling them to allow themselves to struggle for at least an hour or two before asking for help.
Tbh even if I had the ability to be a 10x dev, I wouldn’t be that all the time unless I also get a 10x salary ._.
There’s nothing new in this post. The idea that there’s a generation of people who grew up programming because of the cheap computers they owned is exactly why the raspberry pi foundation was set up. So maybe there’ll just be a generation that didn’t grow up with programming and they’ll be the exception.
But beyond that, this guy really needs an editor. Just to chop down half of the wall of text. He does have some good points though.
It’s an open secret that the industry has no idea how to teach people to program. Computer Science degrees famously don’t prepare programmers for the job of programming
This is depressingly true. I had an intern last year and he was utterly hopeless. So I went and looked at the syllabus for his course and it was no surprise at all. It didn’t cover anything that would be relevant to the industry. It barely covered programming at all. I poked around at a few UK universities looking at their syllabuses and only found one that sounded better than useless.
What I would say is that a lot of people seem to choose to do a CS degree when they should choose a software engineering degree. About the only use a CS degree might be would be to get through data structure/algorithm sections of interviews.
It can’t come soon enough. These 10x devs are toxic. They do things like sabotage fakerJs on Github.
Tell me you didn’t read the blog without telling me you didn’t read the blog…
