10x performance has very little to do with algorithmic/academic agility, and everything to do with broad knowledge of software engineering, not creating unnecessary tech debt, pro-actively owning and solving problems, and documenting and automating the shit out of things. 10x devs are seldom ten times faster at wiggling their fingers on the keyboard to shit LOC out. It has very little to do with smarts (although there's a bar) and more to do with stewardship, vision, and common sense.
Something this article just can't capture is that many devs add net negative value by being allowed to work in an organization. They create complexity, chaos, and confusion. They might be smart, they might be dumb - the problem is that they have no clue what they're doing within a software organization, and often they don't care. They ship broken code, awful bugs, badly designed systems. They make bad technology choices. They don't measure their work (metrics, logs). They put no thought into anything other than manual W.O.M.B deployments. etc, etc.
It's very hard to not be 10x more effective than a net-negative dev. And then beyond that there are very good engineers who we typically put on the senior -> principal track who are able to get a lot done across a large organization, and generally create a culture and an economy within a company that is conducive to sustainable engineering. I expect the average principal engineer to be slightly slower than a college student on an algorithms problem (depending on the problem). I don't expect a college student to be able to drive cross-organizational software initiatives in a large company. I also don't expect that of most Senior engineers, and I don't think most Senior engineers I've met are even willing or capable of doing that.
I'm not sure I'd trust one dude's college experiment to be relevant in this domain.
Also a net negative engineer in one setting might not be a net negative in another. Where I used to work we had a senior programmer who never wrote any tests, claimed c++ was the best language ever while pushing c++ code with correctness errors, switched to go and wrote an algorithm with stateful variables that couldn't be multithreaded. Yet I'm sure that probably at least a few tines he must have written a few lines code at Facebook that saved them on the order of millions of dollars
Something this article just can't capture is that many devs add net negative value by being allowed to work in an organization. They create complexity, chaos, and confusion. They might be smart, they might be dumb - the problem is that they have no clue what they're doing within a software organization, and often they don't care. They ship broken code, awful bugs, badly designed systems. They make bad technology choices. They don't measure their work (metrics, logs). They put no thought into anything other than manual W.O.M.B deployments. etc, etc.
It's very hard to not be 10x more effective than a net-negative dev. And then beyond that there are very good engineers who we typically put on the senior -> principal track who are able to get a lot done across a large organization, and generally create a culture and an economy within a company that is conducive to sustainable engineering. I expect the average principal engineer to be slightly slower than a college student on an algorithms problem (depending on the problem). I don't expect a college student to be able to drive cross-organizational software initiatives in a large company. I also don't expect that of most Senior engineers, and I don't think most Senior engineers I've met are even willing or capable of doing that.
I'm not sure I'd trust one dude's college experiment to be relevant in this domain.