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I agree wholeheartedly with this article, and wrote about the same thing back in 2018 [0]. The Hero (or 10x) Programmer is a seductive archetype and I can see why managers and leaders and teams are attracted to the idea. The simple fact is, tho, that just about anything worth doing requires more than one person these days and the toxic negative side effects of “10x disease” on a team ends up outweighing any positive productivity effects a single person can bring.

[0]: “The Myth of the Hero Programmer” https://matthewsinclair.medium.com/0061-the-myth-of-the-hero...



See also The Worst Kind of Programmer [1] which talks about how detrimental the work of high performers often is.

[1] http://mikhailian.mova.org/node/284


The real 10x devs are the ones that just do ten times less work than the rest but you cannot tell from their output.


Haha. That made me laugh. I will now go looking for “The Mythical 1/10th Programmer”.




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