Yup, that's been my experience as someone who asked for a C++ compiler for my 12th birthday, worked on a bunch of random websites and webapps for friends of the family, and spent some time at age 16-17 running a Beowulf cluster and attempting to help postdocs port their code to run on MPI (with mixed success). All thru my CS education I was writing tons of toy programs, contributing (as much as I could) toward OSS, reading lots of stuff on best practices, and leaning on my much older (12 years) brother who was working in the industry. He pointed me to Java and IntelliJ, told me to read Design Patterns (Gang of Four) and Refactoring (Fowler). I read Joel on Software religiously, even though he was a Microsoft guy and I was a hardcore Linux-head.
By the time I joined my first real company at age 21, I was ready to start putting a lot of this stuff into place. I joined a small med device software company which had a great product but really no strong software engineering culture: zero unit tests, using CVS with no branches, release builds were done manually on the COO's workstation, etc.
As literally the most junior person in the company I worked through all these things and convinced my much more senior colleagues that we should start using release branches instead of "hey everybody, please don't check in any new code until we get this release out the door". I wrote automated build scripts mostly for my own benefit, until the COO realized that he didn't have to worry about keeping a dev environment on his machine, now that he didn't code any more. I wrote a junit-inspired unit testing framework for the language we were using (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) - like Matlab but weirder).
Without my work as a "10x junior engineer", the company would have been unable to scale to more than 3 or 4 developers. I got involved in hiring and made sure we were hiring people who were on board with writing tests. We finally turned into a "real" software company 2 or 3 years after I joined.
This sounds similar to the best programmer I personally know and he was an intern working at LLVM at the time. It's funny how companies treat that part of his life as "no experience". Then suddenly he goes into the HFT space and within a couple of years he has a similar rank that people have that are twice his age.
10x engineers exist. To be fair, it does depend which software engineer you see as "the standard software engineer", but if I take myself as a standard (as an employed software engineer with 5 years of experience), then 10x software engineers exist.
Yeah similar story here. Basically if you start programming 10y before your peers of the same age then it’s logical you’ll be more productive and knowledgeable. Maybe a lot of “10x engineers” are just guys who gave themselves a huge head start for whatever reason
To work for the aunt/uncle, friend of the family etc described earlier the thread, or having an older brother helping… 10x programmers have a bunch of people giving them a head-start, not just themselves. Sure the person needs a drive and early start, but it’s moot without the support to actually convert that early start into a career. Maybe not moot, but for sure a whole lot harder.
I was coding before age 10 and delivering homework in website form any chance I got. Coding was just another video game to me. And yet, I didn’t even end up being a programmer, let alone 10x. I was given bad advice from highschool career advisors, lacked the family connections that knew better to give me odd tech jobs, had disinterested teachers at best and ones that insulted students who asked clarification questions at worst. I took an engineering class in highschool where i loved the content but I felt like I didn’t belong and dropped from it convinced tech was not for me after all (and then proceeded making games in unreal in my free time). For every person supporting my interest in CS there were 10 telling/nudging me to give up, so i was eventually worn out and gave it up. I still code 25 years later but I am far behind now instead of ahead.
Anyway, this is a longwinded way to say it takes privilege to be a 10x programmer, not everyone who gives themselves a head start will succeed.
I started learning how to write a Makefile when I was around 15, and I learned all about using tabs. My colleagues didn't touch Make until they were 25 and were extremely confused.
By the time I joined my first real company at age 21, I was ready to start putting a lot of this stuff into place. I joined a small med device software company which had a great product but really no strong software engineering culture: zero unit tests, using CVS with no branches, release builds were done manually on the COO's workstation, etc.
As literally the most junior person in the company I worked through all these things and convinced my much more senior colleagues that we should start using release branches instead of "hey everybody, please don't check in any new code until we get this release out the door". I wrote automated build scripts mostly for my own benefit, until the COO realized that he didn't have to worry about keeping a dev environment on his machine, now that he didn't code any more. I wrote a junit-inspired unit testing framework for the language we were using (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language) - like Matlab but weirder).
Without my work as a "10x junior engineer", the company would have been unable to scale to more than 3 or 4 developers. I got involved in hiring and made sure we were hiring people who were on board with writing tests. We finally turned into a "real" software company 2 or 3 years after I joined.