Every now and again someone pops up challening the notion of the 10x developer… you know, the developer who’s 10x more productive than some other developer.

But if the 80/20 rule is true, and it seems that it is for a large number of things, including most human activities, then there must be 10x developers.

I think the more interesting question is… 10x of what?

It stands to reason that we can have 10x developers across a large number of dimensions. Most technical screening processes are designed to select for one or more of these. But I think it’s worth taking the time to consider carefully which one(s) you care about. Which one(s) describe you? Which one(s) would you select for when interviewing your next teammate?

• 10x more lines of code
• 10x more features completed
• 10x more bugs squashed 🪲
• 10x more bugs created 😱
• 10x more story points completed 🤢
• 10x more story points estimated
• 10x more StackOverflow reputation
• 10x more hours mentoring junior developers
• 10x more leetcode experience
• 10x more languages used
• 10x more clever/dense code written
• 10x more comments
• 10x more hours worked ⏲️
• 10x more blog posts written ✍️
• 10x more documentation written
• 10x more performant code
• 10x more salary
• 10x more customer conversations
• 10x more team blockers removed
• 10x more … you decide