Over my 15 years of professional programming experience, I have worked three times with
“three sigma programmers” (I don’t call them 10x).
Like, their productivity was at least three standard deviations away from the mean.
Two of them were self taught and never completed university (which made me understand that university is not for everybody, for some, it is way too slow a pace).
One of them was a complete ass hole in terms of personal relations.
One of them was leaving code behind him which was hard to maintain (very few
code factorization, overly complex). But still, I recognize he could seriously kick-start a project like putting it on a Saturn V rocket.
The only common trait I found in them is that they were always learning (reading books and practicing) and trying to improve over time.
They were all vi users, which still saddens me to this day, since I am en Emacs user. :^D
Often in open source projects, I interact with people I am pretty sure are 10x but I have never shared an office with them so I cannot be completely sure. For those ones, their common trait is that they all have a CS PhD and have spent some time at INRIA.
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