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The looming demise of the 10x developer

Why an era of enthusiast programmers is coming to an end

   An icon of a clock Publish Date
          July 12, 2023

   An icon of a human figure Authors
          [10]Justin Searls

   I’ve recently been telling anyone who will listen that I am excited to
   be on the precipice of using [11]Sorbet to write a type-checked edition
   of [12]Mocktail that has the potential to unlock productivity workflows
   never before possible in Ruby.

   I’m not there yet.

   I don’t want to say it’s been a “quagmire,” but I’m over [13]150
   commits in, and there’s a lot left to button up before release. It’s
   been a real challenge. Learning Sorbet at all takes a good chunk of
   time, to be sure. I’ve also hit a number of thorny edge cases and
   elusive bugs along the way (both in the type system itself and that the
   type system exposed in my code). And, like usual, I’m trying to do
   something that’s never quite been done before, so I’m constantly
   oscillating between feelings of nervous excitement and fear that I’m
   attempting the impossible. (Though it’s been made far more possible
   thanks to the generous assistance of [14]Ufuk Kayserilioglu, [15]Kevin
   Newton, and [16]Jake Zimmerman!)

   Beyond this, any specifics I might share about my current quest are so
   banal as to not be worth your time. (If you somehow find this
   interesting, please [17]email me so I might feel less alone in this
   world.) That said, there is something generally interesting here that
   programmers don’t often talk about. And that’s the deeper question: why
   do I keep doing this to myself?

[18]What makes me “special”

   I am an enthusiast programmer.

   I stumble on a problem like this one and I stay up late every night
   until I find the solution. I wake up early each morning with new ideas
   of things to try. I don’t take enough breaks, but when I do, they’re
   tactically-designed to exploit my brain’s asynchronous processor to
   generate solutions for whatever I’m currently stuck on. I irresponsibly
   defer responsibilities from other areas of my life. Eventually, I
   realize I’m only at the 20% mark and that a pattern is repeating where
   a month or more of my life is about to disappear from the calendar.
   Towards the end, I find myself rushing to find the maze’s exit because
   my desire to unlock the puzzle’s final secret starts to be overtaken by
   the shame of all the other balls I’m dropping. It’s excruciating as I
   approach that inflection point—as intense as an overbearing manager’s
   “do or die” deadlines ever were, except in this case the pressure I
   feel is entirely self-imposed.

   And then, at some uneventful moment at 4 pm on a Sunday, it’s done.

   Sometimes people care about what I made. Usually they don’t. Often,
   even I don’t.

   I give myself enough time to clear my inbox, tidy the house, and shave.
   Then I move onto the next Sisyphean task I’ve laid before myself.

   This describes how I’ve lived my life since I was 13 years old, with
   few exceptions. And let me tell you, it’s very difficult to juggle a
   healthy personal life and a sustainable work life when you’re
   simultaneously engulfed in an endless series of side quests to will
   every creative curiosity into existence.

   When I was a consultant at [19]Crowe, there was one year I billed
   clients for nearly 2100 hours, which averages out to more than 40 hours
   per week every week of the year with zero days off. And that’s not
   counting travel time. Or the half-dozen hours of weekly administrative
   work that wasn’t considered billable. Nevertheless, I found time in my
   nights and weekends that year to build an app with Apple’s buggy,
   mostly-undocumented initial iPhone SDK. The app was a native client to
   [20]vBulletin web forums, allowing users to browse threads and compose
   replies. Despite knowing nothing about any of the underlying
   technologies, I obsessively polished the app to perfection. Did I make
   time to sleep? I don’t remember. The whole year’s a blur.

   All so that Apple could reject my app because users might post swear
   words or dirty pictures. Oh, well. Onto the next thing.

   I don’t know what word best describes my behavior above without
   inflecting significant value judgment. Perfectionist? Obsessive?
   Passionate? Whatever we call this compulsion, it’s hardly an unalloyed
   good and it comes with its share of downsides. Nevertheless, it’s one
   of a number of idiosyncrasies and character flaws I’ve decided to lean
   into and find productive outlets for rather than attempting to repress
   or rewire.

   Other examples:
     * I ruminate endlessly under stress, so I wrest back some control by
       manufacturing stress responses over things I’m building to trick my
       brain into ruminating on work that’s useful to me. This both
       overrides the unhelpful, irrational worries that surround me every
       day and unlocks a “second shift” where I accomplish almost as much
       away from the keyboard as in front of it
     * I’m a terrible listener and struggle with auditory processing,
       especially in groups and loud environments. (One reason I talk so
       much is that it’s always felt safer to drive the conversation than
       risk mishearing and offending someone.) Parsing others’ sentences
       often feels like I’m filling in the blanks to make sense of them,
       like playing a game of [21]Mad Libs. Over the years, I’ve
       redirected this into a source of creativity and humor. Most of my
       puns and wordplay are happy accidents as I fill in the gaps in my
       own listening comprehension. Some of my most creative ideas are
       things I swear I heard someone say when it turns out they were
       actually talking about something else
     * I’m a really bad learner—disinterested, distractible, and
       disagreeable. I’ve never enjoyed learning and generally avoid it,
       especially learning for its own sake. At the slightest discomfort
       when struggling to understand something, I’ll grasp for any
       distraction that might offer me a momentary escape. When I do
       manage to get traction, I inevitably find myself disagreeing with
       the premise or subversively trying to prove the authors wrong. The
       upshot is that once I actually do learn something, I know it cold.
       It means I will have scoured every nook and climbed out of every
       pitfall. Professionally, this apparent weakness has turned out to
       be a superpower. 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

   The reason I landed on this topic today is not that any of the above
   makes me special, it’s actually that contradictions like these—whatever
   their origin—are so typical among programmers born before 1990 that
   they’re entirely mundane.

[22]An aberrant generation of programmers

   Squint and everything I just said about myself could have described a
   character from [23]The Big Bang Theory or [24]Silicon Valley. I’m at
   peace with the fact that on my best days, I’m an overplayed, abrasive
   character trope come to life. For decades, we’ve associated a slew of
   mostly-negative traits like these with programmers as if the linkage is
   inherent and inevitable. I’ve always thought that stereotype was
   arbitrary—anybody can learn programming and be great at it—but now I’m
   starting to think it’s a product of our times as well.

   That is to say, I’ve come to believe the era typified by the enthusiast
   programmer—autodidactic, obsessive, and antisocial—is drawing to a
   close.

   Why do I think that? Because 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. Before they were rendered irreducibly complex as consumer
   devices, merely using a computer required figuring out a lot about how
   it worked. And coming of age with an understanding how computers worked
   made programming them far more approachable. And thanks to cosmic
   coincidence and the marketing teams of companies like RadioShack,
   society unwittingly handed a generation of social mobility to [25]the
   boys of upper-middle-class families in the US who felt more comfortable
   at home with their computer than outside engaging socially with their
   peers. I was definitely one of those awkward, anxious kids and a whole
   lot of the programmers I’ve met along the way were too.

   But one reason to believe that programmers don’t have to be like this
   is that programmers weren’t always like this. I remember asking a
   computer science professor in 2003 about our school’s gender disparity
   (we only had a single woman in my class, and she later switched
   majors). He recounted that before 1990 and the advent of hacker and
   gamer subcultures, my college touted robust majorities of women in
   computer science. (Nationally, women’s enrollment in CS doubled in a
   decade, [26]peaking at 37.1% nationally in 1984 before dropping
   precipitously.)

   And one reason to believe programmers won’t always be this way is that
   there’s plenty of evidence that the next generation of professional
   programmers is no longer dominated by enthusiasts. People becoming
   software developers today look markedly different than those who came
   before. (Sadly, I wish I could say I’m referring to the success of
   movements to increase representation from traditionally marginalized
   groups—tech is still dramatically over-indexed on white dudes who
   enjoyed affluent upbringings.) I’m just pointing to all the money
   sloshing around here: it catapulted programming from a firmly middle
   class job that appealed to people who really loved computers into a
   comfortably upper-middle class profession that attracts anyone who
   wants to secure their financial future. Ask anyone who switched careers
   in the last decade how many times someone suggested they “learn to
   code.” Countless people are entering the industry simply because
   programming is a relatively secure, well-paying profession. (And
   there’s nothing wrong with that!)

[27]Inter-generational conflict is brewing

   I’m not sure if anyone has ever said “OK boomer” to my parents, but I
   can imagine it wouldn’t feel awesome to hear.

   Nor do I know whether anyone will coin a term to dismiss my generation,
   but I have faith that there’s enough societal exasperation out there
   for someone on TikTok to come up with something snappy. A lot of people
   in my professional cohort still see themselves as social outcasts who
   grew up in front of a CRT in their parents’ basements, but I suspect
   the next generation sees a homogenous monolith of 40-somethings wearing
   hoodies and sandals (with socks!) that lucked their way into capturing
   control of the software industry just as it settled into a state of
   economic maturity.

   Sit with this distinction for a while, and you might start to see these
   old-hat programmers as belonging to an Enthusiast Generation, one
   that—due to its unique initial circumstances—is unlikely to be
   replicated. Once I introduced the word “generation” to my thinking, it
   became easier to make sense of many contentious, unresolved issues in
   tech that flared up over the past decade by looking at them through the
   lens of intergenerational conflict. And just like any discussion of
   generations, it’s important to caveat that there are no firm boundary
   lines, that exceptions are plentiful, and that many observations will
   be isolated to a single locale and culture (the U.S. in this case,
   maybe Canada?). The only thing that bucketing people into generations
   can do for us is provide a new way to look at how a population may be
   changing, thanks to a big enough time-step to perceive the accumulation
   of decades of gradual change.

   To illustrate, I’ll highlight three high-profile conflicts that make a
   different kind of sense when viewed as a generational shift.

[28]Passion

   I remember about 8 years ago, people [29]got [30]passionate [31]about
   [32]the [33]word [34]passion.

   This rubbed me the wrong way at first. Then again, everything does.

   I remember thinking, “banning the word ‘passion’ will just lead people
   to pick others like ‘self-driven’, ‘highly-motivated’, and
   ‘ambitious’.” I remember asking, “are we supposed to screen out
   candidates for whom programming is a hobby outside work?” What I don’t
   remember was pondering whether this was an indication that the times
   were changing.

   When I entered the industry, my salary was lower than it would’ve been
   if I’d gone into accounting, or become an actuary, or majored in civil
   engineering—myself and most of the people around me did get into
   software because we were passionate about it. Reading tweets and
   thinkpieces that suggested “passion” was a four-letter word felt like a
   personal affront, so I responded defensively.

   What I wasn’t thinking about was what it must have felt like for
   everyone who entered the industry expecting their job to be a job but
   who found themselves managed by people from my generation who didn’t
   leave them room to have a life outside work. Maybe everyone else on the
   team worked overtime without being asked. Maybe taking “too much”
   supposedly “unlimited” time off would foreclose any chance for a
   promotion. Maybe building rapport at lunch required holding evolved
   opinions on Emacs vs. Vim, or mechanical key switches, or whatever was
   on the front page of Hacker News. That sounds like a pretty miserable
   existence, especially if programming isn’t what gets you out of bed in
   the morning.

   If you allow for the possibility we’re undergoing a generational
   change, maybe this debate over “passion” is evidence that the
   assumption that most programmers will always be passionate about
   programming was mistaken and counter-productive.

[35]Craftsmanship

   This brings another contentious word to mind: “craftsmanship.” Its
   origin, as I witnessed it, was a reaction to the watering down of the
   technical aspects of the agile software movement in the late 2000s in
   favor of more lucrative soft-skills training and consulting services.
   In case you missed it, most of the craftsmanship meme could be summed
   up as a Slow Code movement. There was a lot of talk about measuring
   twice and cutting once, establishing apprenticeship programs to train
   new programmers, and a million ways to leverage automated tests for
   purposes other than testing things.

   I was an active participant in this community, speaking at the
   [36]conference several times, putting [37]my name on the manifesto, and
   generally exhorting anyone who would listen to please make their
   software less terrible.

   But looking back, the craftsmanship movement wasn’t only about
   rekindling the tremendous engineering insights of agile methods like
   [38]Extreme Programming, it was also a response to a rapid influx of a
   generation of programmers who didn’t care about code quality the same
   way we did. There was a sense that serious programmers were under
   threat and hopelessly outnumbered by unserious ones. That if your team
   didn’t get more disciplined about what you allow in your codebase,
   you’d find yourself mired in a maze of complexity, beholden to epochal
   build times, and left holding the bag with yet another legacy system.

   Thinking about this point of tension as another manifestation of the
   generational shift we’re experiencing, it’s easy to spot the problem:
   “what you allow in your codebase” is a wee bit too easy to conflate
   with “who you allow in your codebase.”

   Shibboleths like “test-driven design” were so numerous that, to
   outsiders, even perfunctory conversations were riddled with rhetorical
   land mines. The emphasis on apprenticeship also carried assumptions
   nobody seriously grappled with: that it implied “one true path” to
   programming, that somebody (us) had uniquely figured it out, and that
   the only way to learn it was to imitate the people who came before you.
   I watched more than one conference talk advocating for
   professionalizing software like any other trade by licensing
   programmers just like we do plumbers, electricians, and [39]Canadian
   engineers. Everyone’s intention was to prevent people from writing bad
   software, but some of the movement’s prescriptions would have prevented
   many people from writing software at all.

[40]10x Developers

   Before you say anything, I know [41]you [42]probably [43]already
   [44]have [45]an [46]opinion [47]on [48]the [49]idea of a “10x”
   developer. If you aren’t familiar, the term refers to
   debatably-mythical programmers whose output is worth that of ten other
   programmers. What aspects of that output? Which ten other programmers?
   Unclear.

   The concept behind the “10x” term predates either of the generations of
   programmers being discussed here. It seems to have originated in
   [50]this (flimsy) 1968 study that among experienced programmers, the
   best were ten times more productive than the worst (as opposed to the
   average). We remember it because it was referenced in the late Fred
   Brooks’ seminal [51]Mythical Man-Month.

   That some people are better at their jobs than others is (usually)
   uncontroversial. At least, it was, until it bubbled up in The Discourse
   during the 2010s as a flashpoint over who the industry chooses to
   valorize, often sparked by tweets from people affiliated with venture
   capital and advocating that founders should strive to “only hire 10x
   developers.”

   In response, many people who reasonably identified this framing as
   unproductive chose to pick a weird fight by claiming that 10x
   developers don’t exist instead. This invited a lot of
   counter-criticism, as I think most of us can dream up examples of
   people whose work is 1/10th as valuable as their own. From there, the
   conversation shifted to counter-counter-critiques enumerating the
   adverse knock-on effects of adding a toxic actor to a team, no matter
   how much of a ninja/rockstar they are at coding.

   And it was here that the conversation settled into a stalemate, with
   clear battle lines dividing the two camps. On one side were proponents
   who believed a lot of well-compensated programmers aren’t very good,
   but that a few programmers are so good that the value they generate far
   exceeds the range of a typical payscale (which was why Google used to
   brag that they “[52]pay unfairly”). On the other side were critics who
   were more than happy to project every negative stereotype about
   programmers onto these supposedly hyper-productive ones, suggesting a
   10x developer’s easy-to-measure output often came with hard-to-measure
   organizational and technical costs.

   But now, looking back, this debate would have gone a lot differently if
   we’d considered it through the valence of inter-generational conflict.

   I’ll come clean: do I believe some programmers are at least an order of
   magnitude better at programming than others? In my experience … yes.
   I’ve worked with programmers who routinely solve problems in minutes
   after I’ve wasted days or weeks on them. I’ve witnessed a programmer
   singlehandedly build something in a day that an entire team struggled
   to deliver in two weeks—without any of the catastrophic antisocial,
   unsustainable downsides one might imagine. I’ve honestly seen more
   socially corrosive behavior from the other end of the productivity
   spectrum, because programmers who spin their wheels and make zero
   forward progress for days, weeks, or months will inevitably scramble
   for a way to save face.

   It may be uncomfortable to admit, but it’s not altogether unreasonable
   to speculate that enthusiast programmers may, in aggregate, outperform
   professional programmers who hang up their keyboard at the end of each
   shift. In my experience, these traits differentiate the former from the
   latter:
     * Tireless: spending more time practicing programming—not under
       coercion to work long hours, but being intrinsically motivated to
       do so—will generally make someone a better programmer
     * Tenacious: chasing down answers with limitless curiosity and
       relentless, no-holds-barred tenacity—whether or not it’s in their
       job description to spelunk open source stack traces or debug other
       teams’ code—will yield better information and faster progress
     * Thorough: priding oneself on the quality of one’s work and pursuing
       excellence in the (brace for it) craft—not falling victim to
       perfectionism, but cutting the right corners when necessary—will
       produce better-working software that’s easier to maintain

   In the context of this generational rift, all three of the above are
   exemplified by (but by no means exclusively limited to) us last-gen
   models: the individual that programs in their spare time, obsessively
   refuses to let a hard problem go, and is personally invested in the
   quality of their work product.

   I can’t imagine this dynamic feels awesome for members of the new
   generation who don’t want to spend more than 40 hours a week at their
   computer, or who have significant family commitments, or who aren’t
   inclined to asynchronously ponder refactoring techniques as they run
   errands. Will they be forever outpaced by more enthusiastic colleagues
   for whom “programmer” is an all-encompassing identity as well a career?
   I don’t know.

   It’s an uncomfortable conversation because it’s an uncomfortable
   reality.

[53]What do we do with this?

   The power of an analogy lies in what it empowers people to do.
   Envisioning programmers as belonging to discrete generations who are
   ushering in a dramatic transition in the industry can equip us to
   identify the common threads between many of the challenges we’re
   currently facing. It may even enable us to predict and plan for
   inevitable difficulties in the future, as more members of the earlier
   generation age out.

   Suppose you’ve read this far and you can buy both these arguments:
    1. The next generation of programmers are less likely to be motivated
       by a love of programming than the previous generation and may
       differ in profound ways as a result
    2. Software, as an industry, has structurally organized itself around
       the assumption programmers will continue to resemble members of the
       outgoing generation

   If so, then you can probably imagine there will be a lot of problems to
   be solved here. The hot-button issues we revisited above are already
   known, even if we failed to put our collective finger on a common cause
   at the time. It’s likely that countless more challenges lie beneath the
   surface, waiting for the spark that causes them to boil over. It’s up
   to us whether we put in the work to uncover and address these problems
   proactively.

   Here are a few examples of questions I find myself asking after sitting
   with this for a few days:
     * The new generation is more likely to expect structure and support
       from human resources and management, whereas the previous
       generation is more likely to find active management (e.g. career
       pathing, coaching, goal-setting) actually saps their autonomy and
       intrinsic motivation. Can organizations effectively cater to the
       needs of both groups?
     * 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?
     * Betting your business on a limitless supply of self-starting,
       self-sufficient, self-disciplined candidates seems a lot like
       investing in the long-term prospects of fossil fuel extraction. How
       will companies that built their cultures around enthusiast
       programmers adjust to a generation needing more direction, more
       support, and more accountability?

   All we know for sure is that time keeps marching forward and change is
   a constant, so planning for a future that looks different than the past
   is usually time well spent.

   What challenges do you see in this generational transition? I’d love to
   [54]hear from you! If you enjoyed this piece and want to keep up with
   what myself and the other agents are up to, you should check out our
   [55]monthly newsletter.

[56]Justin Searls

   An icon of a human figure Status
          Double Agent

   An icon of a hash sign Code Name
          Agent 002

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          Orlando, FL

   [57]Twitter [58]Mastodon [59]Github [60]LinkedIn [61]Website

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References

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   5. https://testdouble.com/careers
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  14. https://github.com/paracycle
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  17. mailto:justin@testdouble.com
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  23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bang_Theory
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  26. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
  27. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L12618-6018TMP.html#inter-generational-conflict-is-brewing
  28. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L12618-6018TMP.html#passion
  29. https://starbreaker.org/blog/programmer-passion-considered-harmful/index.html
  30. https://www.hotjar.com/blog/the-passion-fallacy/
  31. https://web.archive.org/web/20160304021738/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6523/the_designers_notebook_passion_.php?print=1
  32. https://avdi.codes/the-moderately-enthusiastic-programmer/
  33. https://philippe.bourgau.net/is-there-any-room-for-the-not-passionate-developer/
  34. https://exceptionnotfound.net/passion-not-required-its-ok-to-only-program-for-a-paycheck/
  35. file:///var/folders/q9/qlz2w5251kzdfgn0np7z2s4c0000gn/T/L12618-6018TMP.html#craftsmanship
  36. https://scna.softwarecraftsmanship.org/
  37. http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/
  38. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming
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