TL;DR: I think the proverbial 10x developer is real and I think they are that good because they habitually "write the thing down". Which makes them better thinkers. Which clarity of mind betters not only their odds of solving known problems better and faster, but also their odds of unearthing the right unknown problems better and faster. Further, they influence people around them to become reliably better, be it by direct mentoring, osmosis, or bar setting. Small reliable improvements compound. That is how they 10x. I, for one, am on it and I am game to help.
Det. Lester Freamon:
Seems that Stringer Bell is worse than a drug dealer . . .Det. Roland 'Prez' Pryzbylewski:
He's a developer.— The Wire.
LR: Grab a coffee…
As a software developer, it bothers me when developers disdain writing.
Somehow, our tribe manages to simultaneously deify banging out reams of code and scorn deliberate, long form reasoning. Perhaps we believe that fetching more coin for one's work than another confers natural superiority over them. And since all of one's writer friends must bartend or babysit or ghostwrite or self loathe while feeding SEO machines just to feed themselves, "writing words" must be low value and low status. The Efficient Market cannot possibly have made such a gobsmacking boondoggle, right? … Right? 1
Bloody hell. Writing powers our entire modern civilization. 2
You and I are here because of it. We are software authors. Writing is what we do. Great writing we admire is stunningly difficult because it requires at least the same intensity of mental effort, abstract creativity, and intellectual discipline sustained over long periods of time; months and years 3.
Do we fail to see it because it is blindingly obvious?
Anyway, we don't have to be so high falutin'. We can just look around and think for ourselves.
Det. Roland 'Prez' Pryzbylewski:
"Failure to properly identify myself as a police officer." Sounds like what I was guilty of most of my career, actually.— The Wire.
On the solo extreme of the spectrum, consider legendary individuals like, say, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan 4. Consider the legions of C programmers that learned at their feet, using The C Programming Language book (first edition, 1978). Consider the great C programmers who came after them and authored great C programs — severally by themselves — cURL, SSH, ffmpeg, Linux, SQLite to name just a few. You see, C became great not only because it was revolutionary, or benefited from great timing. It became great because Archmages taught how to wield it, by writing with clarity. Even if their book lightly influenced just one of the other great software authors, K&R would each be One Million x developers, by way of the value unlocked by that developer advocacy, to use today's in term. Even at that colossal magnitude of writing-powered leverage, they are not alone by a long shot. If you can think up other writerly developers with like impact, you may grudgingly agree that a bit of hyperbole isn't unwarranted.
Somewhere across the spectrum, toward somewhat larger groups of people, consider popular acquisitions like Whatsapp, Instagram, YouTube etc. Kings' ransoms paid to acquire things built, scaled, and operated by absurdly small engineering teams. Things that have gone on to repay their purchase prices many times over 5. Software is extreme leverage.
Now, a team of developers is a finickier beast than a lone one. The larger the headcount, the easier it is to play Chinese Whispers, and the faster it is to get worse-er. Which is to say, communicating very well with each other becomes mission-critical (if you want to perform at an elite level, of course).
I will bet good money that those unicorn teams that exited for tens of millions of dollars of valuation per developer weren't A-teams merely because they were full of A-players. They were so highly leveraged by dint of being A-grade written communicators.
Well, actually I don't need to bet. Someone already bet big for us.
At the behemoth end of the spectrum, if my six-page narrative memo helps convince my CEO to fund the multi-billion dollar cloud computing project, the memo alone is worth my weight in gold, to my career. I'm not saying "Copy Bezos.". I'm saying notice that Bezos understood the incredible value of hard-coding common sense writing practices into the organisational fabric. Similarly, lore of the "BillG Review" is semi-known 6. And I've heard of "Jerry Yang Reviews" that some veteran Yahoo! s may recount.
I contend these are not random anomalies, merely ones that got popular press coverage. Trust me not… root about the woodwork and you'll see for yourself; the ones and twos, the squads, the giants.
Omar Little:
Look man, I do what I can do to help y'all. But the game is out there, and it's either play or get played.— The Wire.
That said, mere mortal developers, like Yours Truly, may aspire to such towering international brilliance only at great peril. Not gonna happen, yo. That said, I believe we can aspire to be 10x better than we are today.
"How?" is an open secret… Learning to write — and therefore think — with clarity is how we get there.
However, there is good news and bad news. Luckily, also some relieving news.
The good news?
We have it easy compared to actual writers.
For us, is not about becoming literature majors, and holding down a software job to feed ourselves while we try to get published. For us, the writing is about putting common sense stuff down in a centrally searchable database (a wiki). We can forgo grammar and lyrical prose 7 as long as we at least write structured outlines, using simple phrases and headlines and bullet points and tables and suchlike. It need not be compelling, merely useful. Also writing like a writer is a nice cherry on top. By the way, it is easy to notice that very good developers are frequently very good writers too. Vice-versa, I believe good writers can train to be good developers. The mental wiring is very similar.
The bad news?
There are no silver bullets.
Writing is unnatural, especially for teams. Remember Bezos? Well, even someone with his smarts, charisma, and sweeping authority over his company had to work to make it work…
- It is a conscious choice. We have to culture ourselves into pervasive, thoughtful, effective engineering writing not just individually, but as teams and whole org charts. LLMs may make writing life easier, but only we can do the work to make it work.
- It is not a one off activity. Our kind of writing remains useful only through repeat use and progressive revision throughout the life of a software.
- It requires widespread buy-in. One can't force it. Doing so will reliably cause more damage than good, by violently convincing people that it sucks, because the experience of it will in fact suck for everyone involved. If you find yourself in a leadership position in a writing-averse culture, boy do you have your work cut out. How will you save your people from the septic floodwaters of Meeting Overflow?
- It is not a template. For example, if you try to copy Bezos and some imagined "Amazon Way", you will at best create a poor facsimile, which will only degrade over time. Just like those who tried and failed and still do, to recreate the Toyota Way. Many are seduced by the allure of their Zen-like philosophy, lofty principles, and relentless success. Few notice how deep their writing practice goes, and how central it is to the ongoing success of their Way. So draw inspiration by all means, but work intelligently with your own context.
- It will reveal -your- nature and values. If you fear that you might create a nightmare bureaucracy of soul-sucking process documentation and inter-personnel file redirection, you may need to stop right now and do some heavy soul-searching.
Maybe some more great points that elude my mind. But you catch the drift, yes? Ain't no silver bullet.
The relieving news?
It is not an all-or-nothing deal. We can be gradual. We can start small. Even one person is enough to begin with.
We can learn and apply "developerly writing" 8 in a series of wee progressions, apt for the local context. Each progression can be made to systematically compose with the ones that came before, such that composition compounds value. Sustained compounding delivers integer multiplication.
With some perseverance, smart tooling, and some luck (fortune favours the prepared), we can become the 10x version of ourselves.
Prosecutor:
Mr. Little, how does a man rob drug dealers for eight or nine years, and live to tell about it?Omar Little:
Day at a time, I suppose.— The Wire.