The PHP Reflection API

I used to be a 10x developer in the team, but now I avoid it at all costs

There is a term I hear on the internet about the '10x developer'. According the definition it is a single individual that works much more efficient and faster than an average developer and also with a much lower error rate. This term seems to apply perfectly for me at one of my previous jobs. The absolute record I got was completing an entire 2-week sprint in 2 days alone including testing and no bugs introduced. This was not because of bad estimates, but because I just increased my working pace, because without me the sprint would actually have taken 2 weeks to complete. This made me feel as irreplacable for the company, but I was still a rookie understanding the problem with it.

I was always working on the same project, so the affinity and quirks of the project were like a second nature to me. Getting in the flow/zone/hyper focus is also a second nature to me. Since I've kept my fitness high with lots of cycling and running I could also keep concentrated for extended periods of time and do fast context switching. I also remember every choice made in the past perfectly. Now also add a high education level and you get why it seems that no developer could keep up with me.

But the longer I was working on the project the unhealthy balance of a '10x developer' in the team were getting there. Estimates were hard to do as basically you get remarks like: "You are on holiday so we estimate to do a lot less".

The more complex user stories most important for the stakeholders was always given to me and as expected this led to a self-fullfilling prophecy. I was always given the harder stories and made it myself (and remember what I built) which made it almost impossible for others to get better in the project. My working pace basically slowed down the other developers in growing.

The real eye opener for that my '10x developer'-approach was bad, was when a devoted colleague in my team got  a performance review. The colleague was more into soft skills and doing things outside programming, but she heard that she should be more like me to perform better. Just by accident I ran into her when taking the train going back home. I thought that the performance review was bad and felt bad that she got a bad performance review, because she was really devoted to the project as well. I invited her to join us at my house for dinner so she could ventilate her thoughts and feelings to me and my girlfriend. This small gesture was really appreciated, much more than me outperforming her in coding.

From then on I changed my view on performance only. I could go faster, but if I do not help my team in getter better, the overall speed of the team is not good. I've learned to focus more in helping other developers getting better, even thinking how to write my code with other people reading it in mind. It also felt more as a rewarding challenge to write code other people can work with then focusing on getting the job done as soon as possible.

Sadly the company I worked there was getting more in performance and I even got a performance review telling me my working pace became slower than usual, but still much higher than everyone else. The 'performance only'-approach made many people toxic and selfish and within a year almost all good programmers, including me, left one by one. Maybe I'm working slower compared to back then and I can't even get on the working pace even if I wanted, but as a developer I feel more complete and would never want to get back in this '10x developer'-vibe. To me a '2x team' is much more productive than a single '10x developer'.

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