
The Nonsense of 10X Developers and GitHub as a CV - wfaler
https://codequalified.com/blog/2014/11/20/nonsense-of-10x-developers-and-github-as-a-cv/
======
AReallyGoodName
Having no open source projects to show off = nothing special.

Having projects to show off = something that makes you stand out.

There's no way around this. I can understand why people haven't got open
source projects to their name and that's fine but that doesn't change the fact
that those that do will look better in interviews.

~~~
kasey_junk
Have you measured this assertion in anyway? I'm not making a claim one way or
the other, but what I have found is that people's perceptions about what is
indicative of good candidates is rarely what is actually indicative and data
goes a long way to dispel/confirm myths.

~~~
sheepmullet
The problem is we don't have data on the candidates we don't hire.

~~~
kasey_junk
I agree that the negative's are a very difficult case, but in my experience is
that most people don't cover the easier case of candidates they can evaluate.
Further, evaluation techniques themselves are pretty error prone. But without
collecting data and experimenting with it, how do we improve the problem?

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dalke
The summary of the issue by gnat at
[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good..).
is quite good. I find McConnell's argument on "10x" (as a shorthand for
"4x-20x") more defensible, and distrust the modality argument made by
Bossavit, though Bossavit has additional reasons for why 10x is inappropriate.

Unless there's been new research in the last 4 years or so, I don't think
there's anything more to say about this topic than what those two have
written.

~~~
thelucky41
That link has some good references and conclusions based from data. There is a
very likely chance that professional programmers can have an impact that is
many times that of their colleagues.

The original article is the author's anecdotal evidence that a 10 times
difference in productivity is caused by environment. It's enough to generate a
hypothesis, at least. After reading a few of the references, I've found it's
even harder to generate good data for this than I expected. It would be of no
surprise to me that environment is a large confounding factor on what
generates these "10x" programmers.

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bobloblawblah
I do agree with the author that a 10x environment is required for a 10x
programmer.

I was a 4x-5x programmer at my last position relative to my co-workers.
However, I was fired after I tried to take my government legislated vacation
entitlement after 3 months notice (and after the employer lost the right to
dictate when I could take the vacation). The threat of firing also came with a
promotion without additional pay. Bureaucracy, & labour violations in the
pursuit of profit has created a <1x environment.

Mine is somewhat of an extreme case, but anyone will lose any motivation to
outperform without commensurate pay/recognition.

~~~
FD3SA
Yours is not an extreme case at all. In fact, this is standard fare in the
industry, but nobody wants to admit it happens to them because it's
embarrassing.

Europe has very strict vacation policy (mandated 5-6 weeks), healthcare
benefits and employee protections (hours worked, overtime pay, etc). I wonder
why that is? Western Europe isn't exactly a developing region. Maybe they
realized that you can't give employers all the power and expect them to act
benevolently at the expense of profit.

American work laws are dystopian. Being an employee in the USA is sheer
stupidity. PG says as much during his essays. I always find the "Who's hiring"
threads comically ironic on HN.

We're here not to be employees, but to become entrepreneurs.

~~~
kasey_junk
There are lots of thing in that comment that indicate it is not a USA based
employee at all. For instance, I don't know of any jurisdiction in the USA
that has a vacation mandate.

So, that isn't to say that USA's work laws are good, only that European style
work laws are not enough to prevent abuse.

~~~
danudey
The difference is that if Europe/Canadian workplace laws are being violated,
you have recourse, which means you don't have to choose between 'whatever the
employer decides to require' and 'quit my job and suddenly have no income'.

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ChuckMcM
Oh wait, a recruiting firm is dissing the data which makes recruiting firms
less useful? I am not surprised.

Sadly one of the most influential things I've found on how successful a
developer will be at a company is how they like to interact at work and how
the folks at work prefer to interact. And that is something recruiters can't
search for.

~~~
secstate
I couldn't agree more. I've watched folks come and go in the various jobs I've
had, and aside from one very painful case, most of them moved on due to
cultural incompatibilities and not incompetence.

I feel like the "Github is not a CV" posts are about as tired as the "Why I'm
leaving X" posts at this point. Honestly, if the place you're applying doesn't
want your Github account, they wont ask for it. If they do they will. There's
no right answer here.

Me, personally, I love using Github as a CV because it saves me the banality
of trumping up my chest feathers and getting ready for a show that a resume/CV
requires and lets me keep working on things that I'm curious about.

------
sheepmullet
Environment and culture certainly play a big role in developer productivity.
You can do a lot with average.

That being said in any kind of large organisation changing the culture is 100x
harder and slower than hiring better developers.

IMO, building/creating 10x programmers in your area of business is simple but
it is not easy.

\- Ensure at least 25% of your developers times are spent on learning and
development.

\- Give them the freedom to work on what they think are the most important
tasks to the business (e.g. Something similar to open allocation)

\- Ensure you are paying your developers at least market+20% in order to
minimise turnover so you actually get something out of creating 10x'ers.

Now go and try and change a large organisations culture to be like the above.
I'll wait.... And wait... And wait

------
InclinedPlane
"Productivity" is the wrong metric to measure for developers anyway.
Development is not a factory job, developers aren't cranking out widgets on an
assembly line and developers who crank out more widgets aren't somehow
superior to those who crank out fewer.

What matters is the value of what devs have created, and that's almost
impossible to measure objectively in many cases, with some occasional
exceptions. That often takes a lot of work and usually requires someone who is
also highly skilled making a subjective judgment. I complete agree with the
author here, hiring and culture is hard, and most of the time that fact is
ignored and the result is failures on both counts. Taking the time and effort
to be good at either is usually a huge competitive advantage.

It's similar to software. Does your product solve easy problems or hard
problems? If you only solve easy problems, how do you expect that to keep you
ahead of the competition? Determining the talent of a developer is not an easy
problem in the general case, and if you only hire the developers that are easy
to hire you're probably doing it wrong.

------
moe
Who is "codequalified.com" and why should I listen to him?

There's no author name on the post, in fact there's no name on the entire
site. Even the Domain is registered anonymously (DomainsByProxy).

I don't care for names anyway, but there's no links to any external identity
or previous work either.

All I see is an anonymous PR blog, seemingly trying to stir some random
internet controversy for backlinks.

~~~
fabulist
Who is moe?

Knowing someone's name is not a requirement for assessing the quality of their
argument, and whether their observations match your own.

------
tsotha
>Yes, relative skill and productivity between programmers can vary wildly, but
I would posit that most of the difference you see between organisations
ability to deliver software has nothing to do with how many “10X developers”
you have hired and everything to do with culture.

That doesn't jibe with my experience at all.

~~~
wtracy
Peopleware actually covers a study where standardized programming assignments
were handed out to developers for them to take back to their offices and
complete. The programmers were asked to time how long it took to complete
these tasks.

There was dramatically more variance in completion time between organizations
than within any one organization.

BTW, the book is worth reading.

~~~
jeremiep
It could merely be because different organizations have different hiring
standards and cultures and usually gather the same types of people.

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aidenn0
This reads like "There is no such thing as a fast car, only fast racetracks."

Surely it takes both?

~~~
kasey_junk
Maybe, but most of the studies (I'm thinking of Peopleware's examples)
indicate that the environment is the dominant factor and the difference in
people is mostly noise.

~~~
sheepmullet
Do they really though? Have they consistently shown you can take the
developers in a bad environment and put them in a good one and they will be as
productive?

I don't think so. I think they have simply shown that certain environments are
horrible for productivity.

------
drivingmenuts
People asking for code samples from me run up against the NDAs that I've
worked under (code never to be seen by anyone else) or that I don't really
care about the code that I write for me and don't bother storing it on github.

------
thebiglebrewski
First comes a typo in your article in the second sentence:

"though I fear they where actually real conversations"

------
infinitone
The article basically died after saying stuff like:

>Spring Framework is undoubtedly one of the most popular software
libraries/frameworks in the history of mankind, yet it is an abominable bag of
fail and poor engineering.

Typically when you say something like that, you'd actually know what you are
talking about enough to state concisely and easily your reasoning.

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JazCE
So much truth spoken

