I've noticed that people within the same company, are usually comparable in productivity at a micro level, but can be extremely different in productivity at a macro level. If you give someone a very specific feature-task to work on, it usually doesn't matter who you assign it to. But if you give someone a very open-ended task, one that requires making high-level architectural/design decisions, you will get wildly different results which will help/hinder the entire team for years and years. This is where 10x programmers truly exist. They may not be 10x in their own personal productivity. Rather, than unlock 10x productivity for the entire team, through the foundations that they build.
I agree with you in the general sense, but want to point out that programmer productivity is far more than writing code. I think you’ve lumped quite a bit under “productivity for the entire team”.
Debugging code and reading others code are the two big ones to point out that are usually equally important to writing good code.
I have experienced that you can compare programmers in these tasks on a micro level and see drastic different results.
Top programmers tend to not only write code with good foundations, but also have an uncanny sense for the root of seemingly obscure issues, as well as the ability to understand other code almost on sight.
Debugging is the single biggest challenge in my experience for junior devs. It is also the best way to learn.
When they call me up frustrated that they've wasted hours trying to find a bug, whether it be as innocuous as a typo, as subtle as a type-error, or as painful as a quirk in the framework, I will always consider time spent debugging to be worthwhile. As this is when you pull apart the guts of the code, stretch your understanding of it, and learn to isolate the flow of data within a system. Then you can put it back together in a better way.
I've always kinda liked debugging, and sometimes love it. I wonder if there is a general correlation or even predictive property here, with taking to debugging right away and programming achievment. (as little as you know how to program, you still can and will need to debug it, right from the start of learning)
