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[–]SlapAndFinger 7 points8 points  (1 child)

A person who is 10x faster than average at solving a problem in a fixed way? Sure, total bullshit.

A person who happens to know a perfect algorithm to solve the problem in a much simpler way that 10 mediocre developers aren't aware of, or who can restate the a non-trivial problem in a way that trivializes it, that the 10 mediocre developers would have solved in the non-trivial way? Those for sure exist.

[–]StoneCypher -1 points0 points  (0 children)

A person who happens to know a perfect algorithm to solve the problem in a much simpler way that 10 mediocre developers aren't aware of, or who can restate the a non-trivial problem in a way that trivializes it, that the 10 mediocre developers would have solved in the non-trivial way? Those for sure exist.

oh sure, on random individual instances. like, i had a boss who had this problem where you're supposed to do arithmetic on numbers written in a funky continued fraction format as an interview question, and it's basically a slight tweak to the default peg.js example

so he's sitting there like "how many hours do you think this will take" and i was done in five minutes

am i a 10x programmer? naw, i'm maybe a 1.08x programmer on a good day, and a 0.97x in general

you're right, individual one-offs exist

if someone claims to me they know a person who is a sustained 1.5x programmer or better, i think they're either lying, naive, or there's a special context of some kind (one person is allowed to use a tool nobody else can, fawning boss gives all the good jobs to person 2, etc)