Despite never having worked together in the past, they were both agreeing about modern programming concepts not yet taught at our company. There were many lengths of time when it seemed they were speaking an exclusive language. I remember the countless hours spent in the war room brainstorming the architectural design for our new product, which is when I really saw how far ahead of me they both were. In fairness, we did have our reasons for using old technology and methods and have accomplished amazing things with it, so this could happen to any company.Īt times, Mitch and Gary were like two peas in a pod. Rather his sense of what’s normal for a modern software shop was based on experience that was years ahead of ours and yet to be practiced at our company and that must have been frustrating, both for himself and for those around him. I don’t believe he enjoyed making people look stupid, despite being really good at it. So the general consensus was that this guy was a big meanie - to put it nicely. Especially when the gift of enlightenment is often delivered with a lacking of kindness, and sometimes coming off as hostile even. The thing about human nature is, that nobody likes a smarty-pants. I’d feel embarrassed for various others in his path who didn’t know something big that they probably should have known, given their job titles are horizontal to Gary’s position. I’m proud to have proven him wrong once or twice in total, being a person who tries to get their facts straight before speaking. Not in the argumentative, always has to have the last word kind of way, but more like…the guy knew everything - about everything. The thing about this guy was that he was always right. his sense of what’s normal for a modern software shop was based on experience that was years ahead of ours… Needless to say, all levels of management were pleased with the long-awaited feature. This, in an aging flagship codebase with a complete lack of unit tests. This was our guy to finally do it.īy the time he had the feature ready for QA, it looked better than I’d at least imagined, was more performant than we had expected, and it was backed by thousands of unit test assertions. A feature that everyone in the company had been pipe-dreaming about for years but never took it on, due to multiple challenges. For the first few months, Gary was quiet and mostly kept to himself, hard at work on a highly technical feature - air and fluid flow animation in our real-time 3D mechanical training software. We also hired an SE II called Mitch around the same time but we’ll get to that later. Nearly a decade ago, the Director of Software Development at my employer at the time, hired a Software Engineer III, who we’ll call Gary. Does the myth, the legend, live up to its name, or is it just a relative perception?īefore we get into the key takeaways, I’d like to give it context with some storytelling. Some people want to be them, others want to stay far away from them. Lately, I’ve seen a lot of answers to online questions about the fabled 10x developer.
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