>10x to mean as many different things is a good reason to avoid the term altogether. The whole thread is just "10x programmers don't exist because X" and "10x programmers exist because Y", where X and Y are unrelated.
Yes, I understand your complaint here too but the various X-Y meanings isn't really the fault of "10x"... it's caused by any label. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797871
E.g. the alternative word "expert" or "effective" such as "effective programmer" would cause the same debates:
- I think an effective programmer is one who understand the whole stack from hardware gates to web stack
- No I think a truly effective programmer is one who empowers his team members.
- No an "effective programmer" is really X. No it's Y.
- <... ad infinitum disagreements ... >
It doesn't matter what the word is... "10x", "talented", "expert", "master", etc. There's no consensus definition and yet we haven't tried to eliminate those words.
Generally, I understand that people typically mean "10x" as a synonym for "massively better". (Because nobody who says "10x" has a stopwatch and rigorous academic studies measuring it.) And yes, the counterargument is "10 doesn't really mean anything" ... that's true but the "'massively better'" also doesn't really mean anything -- and yet we can't strike "massively better" from our language so we're back to the same issue.
There is no short label X that "really means" whatever everybody agrees it to mean. That's human language. We muddle onward regardless.
The author of that book, Sean M. Platt, is not a tech guy nor a programmer. He's a high-school dropout that started writing articles and stories. Now, he's mostly a publisher.
The interesting thing is that somehow, the "10x programmer" meme made its way to a non-programmer and he adopted it as "10x author".
Yes, I understand your complaint here too but the various X-Y meanings isn't really the fault of "10x"... it's caused by any label. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797871
E.g. the alternative word "expert" or "effective" such as "effective programmer" would cause the same debates:
- I think an effective programmer is one who understand the whole stack from hardware gates to web stack
- No I think a truly effective programmer is one who empowers his team members.
- No an "effective programmer" is really X. No it's Y.
- <... ad infinitum disagreements ... >
It doesn't matter what the word is... "10x", "talented", "expert", "master", etc. There's no consensus definition and yet we haven't tried to eliminate those words.
Generally, I understand that people typically mean "10x" as a synonym for "massively better". (Because nobody who says "10x" has a stopwatch and rigorous academic studies measuring it.) And yes, the counterargument is "10 doesn't really mean anything" ... that's true but the "'massively better'" also doesn't really mean anything -- and yet we can't strike "massively better" from our language so we're back to the same issue.
There is no short label X that "really means" whatever everybody agrees it to mean. That's human language. We muddle onward regardless.