The 10x developer

The 10x developer? I believe they exist. But, the way they are described, I don't think they are people any team should want.

I don't know if I'm, technically speaking, a 10x developer or not. I know that there were and still are times in my career when I run circles around my peers in getting work done. I also work for a company with a great deal of highly skilled devs though. And there are a few who some times do the same to me. There are also a lot of people who are probably just "developers". And that is just reality.

All I know is that I still get strange looks when I tell interviewers that I wrote 2 complete systems that two businesses ran on. Front end, back end, DB, reporting, and that both systems run without issues for years at a time. And I probably spent less than 2 weeks on each.

But, this image of a shut-in anti-social developer who can code like mad is a thing which would rarely be good, unless your dev team only has room for a single developer.

I would prefer something different. A 10x developer maker. While there are start-ups and contract work where you may be coding alone, most people run into these 10x developers or people claimed to be them is places where there are teams. And this is scary. A lot of these companies would be totally screwed if these devs died or quit.

To that end, I'd rather hire any normal developer and have them writes code which helps other developers get their jobs done faster, is easier for other devs to work with, or helps them grow their own skills. You can't scale a 10x developer. You can scale a team. But, you can only scale a team if you have at least some developers who are focused on improving the team or their output.

I think most development companies overlook this possibility. And it is foolish. You should be writing tools for your own team as well and finding positive ways to share skills and knowledge. A team which supports itself will decimate any team with a single 10x developer and no cooperation.

15 years into this journey I've helped produce tools which tie into our companies framework. Developers can answer about 10 questions and have an SDK spit out a fully functioning application with back end, front end, service endpoints, CRUD operations, authentication, and so on. Then, they run that in an IDE where I've provided tooling to help them continue to develop within that framework. And when the work is done, the applications run as a part of a larger system which my colleagues wrote.

I could be a 20x developer and it wouldn't matter. The work we've done has allowed the other developers and teams within our organization work so much more quickly that my individual contributions are a much smaller slice of the pie. My team has provided tools which help the rest of company run circles around 10x developers.

What would you rather have?

Smart companies produce SDK. Typical developers wouldn't be able to write an Android or iOS app, or even an app of remotely similar quality and functionality without the associated SDKs. These companies are successful not because of individual developers, but because their tooling helps them grow a more efficient community of developers. And that is where I think the focus should be. Any company with a team of developers should be spending at least some of their time finding ways to grow the skills of the team, or to better harness their efforts.

No one should ever glorify even an exceptional coder if they can't work well within a team.