How to turn nearly any developer into a 10x programmer with little to no effort.

Many management courses speak of the range of programming results that can come from a developer, with measurements used finding that the range can extend some developers to being up to as much as 10x as productive as their peers.

This has causes many hiring managers to seek in their hiring process the elusive “10x programmer”.

There’s a catch though. Studies have found that the programmer’s productivity is not tied to the programmer. You may have one scenario where one programmer is the 10x programmer and the other is average, and then you change to a different scenario and the ‘slow’ programmer is now the 10x programmer, with the previous 10x programmer now being the slow one.

This brings up an interesting point.

It’s not the programmer’s specific skill that determines they’re productivity, it’s how closely that programmer’s skill overlaps with the specific scenario.

The problem is, many managers like to think of programmers as assembly line workers, producing products as directed. In reality, programmers are a halfway point between an engineer and an author. An engineer because they’re working in a highly technical system governed by rules that require expertise to navigate, and author because they’re literally writing and deciding what they write to achieve a desired ‘plot’.

This means programming is a technical-creative exercise. And can you imagine a group of painters having to follow a Jira process board to complete paintings? With some reflection, I’m sure you can see what an absurd process that would come out to looking like. It doesn’t take much imagination to go into a fit of giggles considering the conversations that might come out…

“I need you to show steady progress on these paintings in discrete units. Try doing all your reds as one vertical slice so we can see the progress.”

Many larger businesses envy how fast small startups can turn around a new product, add new features, and get the product out the door. Although there are a lot of factors in play, a major one is this:

Often, the programmers were part of the idea pool that created the product in the first place, and steer the direction of the product. As a result, nearly every step in its creation plays specifically to their strengths.

This brings up a easy… but terrifying solution:

If you want 10x programmers. Don’t do anything.

Notice, I did not say, “Don’t do anything different.” I said, “Don’t do anything.”

Here is the a typical workflow in business currently:

The CEO decides, “Our digital product needs feature A”. This idea gets passed to the the CTO who says, “I need to designate this idea to teams C, D, and E.” Then the managers under the CTO say, “Well, I can break this task into stories H, I, J, K, and L.” They then assign these to their developers whom they best think fits. Now, programmers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are having to work with pieces of an idea. A process like this could be done because the CEO wanted the ability to search products by color.

Going back to our artist analogy, let’s consider the same scenario:

The CEO decides, “We need a picture of a Cow, I could make some money with a picture of a Cow”. This idea gets passed to the the CTO who says, “I’m going to get the foreground team, the background team, and the sketching team” Then background managers under the CTO says, “Well, the cow will be in a pasture, so we’ll need a lot of green. The sky will need to be blue. The farmhouse will need to be red. And the wheat the cow is eating will need to be yellow.” He now assigns these to his painters whom they best think fits. Todd, a surrealist, is in charge of greens. Samantha, who specializes in found art pieces, is in charge of blues. Tammy who focuses on digital art, is to do reds. And Bobby, who is all about clay sculpture, is in charge of yellows. The four have to coordinate how to make the painting, have meetings to make sure their colors are overlapping properly, get sketches done of the painting ahead of time from the other team, make sure their art styles they’re putting into the painting are somewhat compatible, and make sure that each one’s brush strokes aren’t knocking around the paintbrushes of the other painters.

As you can see, the ‘work’ of the CEO, the CTO, and the managers have made a simple painting of a cow, anything an artist could do on their own, into a multi-stage cumbersome process. What they have done to the process of the art is “something” rather than “nothing.”

Now lets imagine a different scenario.

The CEO says, “I want some artwork I can monetize.” He tells this to the CTO. The CTO says to the managers, “We need some artwork to monetize.” The managers get the message. The managers go to the artists and say, “We need some artwork to monetize.” to which the artists saying, “Yea… that’s exactly what our jobs are. We’re already working on it.” So the artists work on making artwork. Samantha makes a picture of a sheep in a field using photography and children’s toys. Tammy makes a graphic design of a superhero climbing a building. Bobby makes a sculpture of David drinking a beer. And Todd makes something you can’t describe, but everyone who sees it feels an unmistakable feeling of mystique about ice-cream and an intense desire to eat sushi.

Now let’s turn that back into programming.

The programmers know they need to improve the site. Programmer 1 has been frustrated with how sluggish the site is, and takes it on himself to focus on optimizing for speed and adaptability. His change moves up the pipeline and the site now ranks higher is search results due to Google using site speed as a significant measure in search ranking. Programmer 2 has figured there should be more search parameters — searching by color is hard since you’d have to re-reach out to each client to update their product colors, but searching by customer review is easy since they’ll naturally propagate as people review their products, so he adds search-by-review score. Programmer 3 decides that an AI that predicts your next purchase and connects together would-b customers and clients before they seen know what they want, and it would be great and he’s pumped to do some AI programming. Programmer 4 who has been struggling with eye strain, is getting sick of it, and programs a dark mode for the site. And who knows? Maybe Programmer 5 knows a shortcut to make a color search (just so happens he knows how to program image files, and he just fetches the average foreground color of the picture and applies it… a methodology that might not have come up at the CTO level which would have likely leaned more in the direction of clients setting values, and he does it because everyone else is doing it and he views it as an “easy” task to catch up the company with the industry).

Each programmer is playing to their strengths and ambitions, and is able to code much faster as a result. Although the CEO doesn’t end up with one “cow in a pasture” photo to market, he now has many more products to bring to market, but has to figure out how… but since each is a creation of passion, they’re going to be more well designed and more creative — and help the company’s site stand out more as a result (afterall, everybody was doing the cow photo thing anyway, and now the words “innovative” and “cutting edge” are being applied to the company).

And this isn’t idle speculation. As the linked articles show, there’s real data to back this up. Further, in my own programming career I’ve noticed this pattern. I have built my own sites (complete with search, UI, database management, and new creative ideas) in the course of a weekend. However, in a corporate environment, on a near-identical project (a project that hired me on partially because they saw my self-built project that was near identical to their goals), took literally months to build just a fraction of the functionality because it’s constraints didn’t play to my strengths.

Obviously, the gains to productivity are worth it. The real question is… are managers and executives willing to do nothing and give up some control, and ride the fast waves of creativity that come their way to boost them along, or do they want a controllable and predictable trickle?

And that is for your business to decide.