Axiom: The 10X Employee

Posted on 15/12/2011 by Graham Chastney

One of the characteristics of an axiom is that it’s obviously true and as such you rarely question it.

I’ve subscribed to the view that some people are 10 times more productive than others for a long time – it has been obviously true.

As I look around the place where I work I can see that some people produce wildly more than others.

I’ve also worked on many projects where I’ve seen people who can clear the workload at an astonishing pace, they are obviously, noticeably more productive.

I was reminded of this axiom recently while reading a couple of articles by Venkatesh Raso on Developeronomics:

At the centre of the debate being had here is the idea of the 10x engineer:

The thing is, software talent is extraordinarily nonlinear. It even has a name: the 10x engineer (the colloquial idea, originally due to Frederick Brooks, that a good programmer isn’t just marginally more productive than an average one, but an order of magnitude more productive). In software, leverage increases exponentially with expertise due to the very nature of the technology.
While other domains exhibit 10x dynamics, nowhere is it as dominant as in software. What’s more, while other industries have come up with systems to (say) systematically use mediocre chemists or accountants in highly leveraged ways, the software industry hasn’t. It’s still a kind of black magic.

One of the reactions comes from Larry O’Brien knowing.net describing the 10X engineer like this:

This is folklore, not science, and it is not the view of people who actually study the industry.
Professional talent does vary, but there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, much less on a meaningful timescale such as that of a product release cycle. There is abundant evidence that this is not the case: the most obvious being that there are no companies, at any scale, that demonstrate order-of-magnitude better-than-median productivity in delivering software products. There are companies that deliver updates at a higher cadence and of a higher quality than their competitors, but not 10x median. The competitive benefits of such productivity would be overwhelming in any industry where software was important (i.e., any industry); there is virtually no chance that such an astonishing achievement would go unremarked and unexamined.

In another article from 2008 Larry O’Brien gets into the specifics of programmer productivity:

That incompetents manage to stay in the profession is a lot less fun than a secret society of magical programmers, but the (sparse) data seem consistent in saying that while individuals vary significantly, the “average above-average” programmer will be only a small multiple (perhaps around three times) faster than the “average below-average” developer (see, for instance, Lutz Prechelt’s work at citeseer.ist.psu.edu/265148.html).

So, it would appear, there seems to be some disagreement on this axiom which is precisely why I started this series – how many of my axioms are really just nice ideas?

One of the problems with axioms is working out where I first came across them, this one is proving difficult to remember. I suspect that it comes from my old friends Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister writing in Peopleware:

Three rules of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations in performance over a sample of individuals:
Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1.
Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer.
Count on the half that are better-than-median performers out-doing the other half by more than 2:1.
Peopleware: Individual Differences

But where did this come from: "[this diagram], for example, is a composite of the findings from three different sources on the extent of variations among individuals". So it comes from research undertaken around 1984 on software programmers.

You may have notice that I was vague at the beginning of the post about who the 10X people were being compared with – the median, the worst? It was deliberate, because I didn’t know, the axiom had become degraded over time and I couldn’t be specific. I was confused, and after doing some digging, I don’t think I’m the only one.

DeMarco and Lister point to and reference some real research for 10X being between worst and best which seems like a safe place to be. Everyone seems to agree that there is an order of magnitude difference between median and worst so that seems like a safe place to be too.

I feel like I’m having to constrain my curiosity a bit because there would appear to be so much more to learn but my time is limited. So I’m sticking to the safe areas.

Whatever the true axiom, we all need to understand that there is a significant difference in people’s productivity (however you might be measuring productivity) which makes it’s vitally important that we get the right people doing the right things. But it’s also important that we understand what our 10X place is and seek to optimise our time there and try to remove the constraints that are keeping us from getting there (he writes after a day of endless interruptions and chats resulting in very little personal productivity Smile ).

Inappropriate cultural tendencies

Posted on 22/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

When it’s light enough I cycle home from work across a park. It’s quite a big park and has a semi-dedicated cycle path right through the middle. I say semi-dedicated because it’s really a wide path across the park with a big white line down it, there’s also a set of painted cycle symbols on the side that is intended for cycles.

Within the UK we drive on the left.

As I cross the park on my way home, the cycle track is on the left.

Everyone walking in my direction is walking…on the left, on the cycle track. It’s very rare that I see someone walking in my direction who isn’t walking on the cycle track.

They are walking over the large symbols of cycles telling them that it’s an inappropriate thing to do.

They give me a glare every time I pass them by (even when they are stood on top of a big symbol of a cycle) as if I am the one being inappropriate..

Why?

They have no reason to be walking on the left. There are no indications that would suggest that they do it. Actually the indication is that they should walk on the other side.

The only reason that they are consistently walking on the left is our cultural tendency to walk the way we drive – on the left.

The cultural tendency is stronger than all of the signage. It’s even stronger than their experience – people rarely change sides after I’ve passed them.

I should also point out that all of the people walking in the opposite direction are also driving on their left.

I wonder what other cultural tendencies are making us do inappropriate things?

My (Former) Job No Longer Exists

Posted on 17/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

I used to do a job that no longer exists.

Technology has made the job that I used to do mostly redundant. The task that I used to do still gets done, it’s just that it’s no longer a full time job because technology does most of it without requiring someone to think about it.

There are parts of the job that I currently do that will no longer be required soon, I’m sure of that.

I’m not worried though.

Change gives me the opportunity to learn something new.

Change gives me the opportunity to create something new.

Change gives me the opportunity to stop doing some things that are a bit of a chore.

It’s a changing world and we all need to recognise it and respond. This isn’t anything new, it’s always been like that.

Have you met a wheelwright recently? They still exist, but there used to be thousands of them.

How about a tweeny? Do you even know what a tweeny is?

I may be technical, but that doesn’t mean I only do technology

Posted on 14/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

I’ve had a couple of situations recently where someone has said to me something along the lines of – "you wouldn’t understand because it’s not a technical question".

It’s an interesting cultural thing that we do in the UK, we pigeon-hole people into technical and business as if one wouldn’t understand the other.

Don’t people know the history of the UK?

Our history is littered with people who made fortunes out of doing technical things and in the process created millions of jobs and shaped the towns and cities where we live.

I, for one, regard the label of technical as a badge of honour, but don’t try and pigeon-hole me there, you might get a surprise.

Weird English #2

Posted on 08/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

Why do we use the same spelling for two different meanings and often two different pronunciations?

Produce (groceries) and produce (create something)
Wound (affliction) and wound (action of winding)
Polish (make things shiny) and Polish (an east european people group)
Dove (to dive) and Dove (the bird)
Row (argument) and row (with paddles)
Does (deer) and does (to do)
Sow (pig) and sow (with seeds)
Intimate (suggest) and intimate (close)

Weird English #1

Posted on 04/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

Why, if you spEAk to a group of people do you make a spEEch?

(Is it significant that this is post #888?)

Because it’s Friday: Visual News

Posted on 04/11/2011 by Graham Chastney

Back to the regular Friday them of how we make things more visual, today’s example is – the news.

Newsmap has been around in beta for a little while, but I’ve never written about it. Here is the news for today (4th November 2011 at 8:20) for the UK in visual form:

It’s not the only visual news site out there, but I like this one.

I have to admit though, it always makes me slightly sad, while many of these things are really important, some of the things that get people attention are not important at all.

On a lighter note: It always manages to highlight something I hadn’t seen, and that’s exciting for an information addict.

Axiom: Interruptions cost 20 minutes

Posted on 18/10/2011 by Graham Chastney

You’re sitting at your desk working away focussing in on a problem that’s been on your list to resolve for weeks.

You start to uncover the various layers of the problem ruling some things out, adding new things in.

This isn’t a simple problem, it’s a bit complicated and you feel a bit like you are Poirot unravelling a mystery. You’re starting to build a real sense of achievement.

You’re not sure how long you’ve been working on this problem but just at the point you are starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel your boss walks in and asks why, yet again, you haven’t provided your weekly status report. You explain that you’ve been very busy doing real work and didn’t think anyone read the status reports anyway.

After a two minute conversation you return to your problem, but you’ve lost the thread – "where was I again". You curse your boss. Your curse yourself for coming into the office today.

You start all over again trying to resolve this knotty little problem. It takes you an age to regain the concentration that you had.

This is such a common problem that we accept it as normal. People have even adapted their working habits to try and carve out some time to get some work done.

The interruptions abound – email, phones, instant messaging, social media, people, meetings. But what is the cost of those interruptions.

My axiom has always been that the cost of an interruption is 20 minutes.

I thought that I’d got the 20 minute part from a book called Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister but I’ve recently been rereading it and actually it says this:

During single-minded work time, people are ideally in a state that psychologists call flow. Flow is a condition of deep, nearly meditative involvement…
Not all work roles require that you attain a state of flow in order to be productive, but to anyone involved in engineering, design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must. These are high-momentum tasks. It’s only when you’re in flow that the work goes well.
Unfortunately, you can’t turn on flow like a switch. It takes a slow decent into the subject, requires fifteen minutes or more of concentration before the state is locked in. During this immersion period, you are particularly sensitive to noise and interruption. A disruptive environment can make if difficult or impossible to attain flow.

So where did I get 20 minutes from? Perhaps it’s just one of those things that changes in your mind over time? Not that it’s really that important, the significant factor here is that an interruption costs you significantly more than the length of the disturbance.

What Peopleware outlines is a theory called flow and the real question, therefore, is whether this theory is really the way our minds work.

The theory of flow appears to have been popularised by a Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (no I don’t know how to say it either), in the 1990′s based on research from the 1960′s and 1970′s. The idea of being in a flow or in the zone or being in the groove have been around for much longer than that.

There appears to be a great deal of research undertaken which, for the most part, would appear to validate the theory outlined by Csikszentmihalyi. For once the article in wikipedia appears to be reasonably authoritative and well referenced.

So I’m reasonably happy that the axiom is true even if it’s not specifically 20 minutes, but we all work in the real world. How do we work in a way that minimises the impact.

The first part of resolving most problems is recognising that it exists, many people don’t.

The second part of overcoming a problem is to recognise the part that we are in control of. I don’t think I’m unique in being able to generate my own set of interruptions. There are also things that I can do to manage many of the disruptions.

There are all sorts of schemes that people use and I don’t think that there is one that suites everyone. The following mind map (not my own) reflects some of the things that I do: