In the book “Mythical Man-Month ,” Fred Brooks demonstrates that the most efficient developers, the so-called “10x developers,” code ten times

Lessons Learned Shadowing the Mythical 10x Programmer

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2021-07-02 09:30:06

In the book “Mythical Man-Month ,” Fred Brooks demonstrates that the most efficient developers, the so-called “10x developers,” code ten times more efficiently than their average counterparts. Surprisingly enough, the heirs of the Stakhanovite movement are software engineers working for big tech companies. 

As a junior software engineer, I wanted to take a closer look at the mythical 10x developers. That is why I shadowed two senior developers at my company, Dataiku, for four days. I will explain later how I chose them. Do they actually deliver ten times more? If so, how do they achieve it? What can we learn from them? In this blog, I will share my findings and astonishments with my fellow software engineers. 

Brooks debatably stated that experience does not always increase the performance of a programmer. For Kyle Coberly , however, Brooks overlooked key performance factors, such as maintainability, communication, and adaptability. When I shadowed the two software engineers, I tried to find out which experiences benefited their careers most. 

I observed Jiffy and Fred , who have been working as developers for seven and seventeen years, respectively. While Fred learned to program as a kid, Jiffy discovered coding during his studies. So, you do not need to learn C++ from the cradle to become a successful coder. Sharing this idea helps attract people from non-traditional backgrounds to software development. Both pursued technical studies, even though it is not a prerequisite to join Dataiku. Fred specialized in IT, telecom, and machine learning while Jiffy studied computer science.

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