There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones - <AUTHOR> http://www.techfounder.net/2013/04/04/there-are-no-x10-developers-but-there-are-certainly-110-ones/ <comment><USER2> These discussions are worse than useless. People with made-up numbers confront people with unreliable anecdotes. Productivity means, very simply, an average of X widgets per hour. Does such a measure even exist for developers? The discussion can apply to such varied situations as:

\- how fast can a developer add new features to a system they built themselves

\- how fast can they add features to a system designed by somebody else

\- how fast do they fix simple bugs

\- how fast do they find horribly complicated bugs

\- how fast can they architect a reliable, multithreaded backend

\- how fast can they work with program management to design a good UI

etc. etc. etc.

These are often conflicting requirements. People who develop a very elaborate personal coding style will be fast on single projects, but slow to work with other people's code. Those who are methodical and question all assumptions will find hard bugs much sooner, but waste time on simple bugs. Those who can construct elaborate systems in their head often have trouble tweaking hundreds of little CSS details for a single ticket. So I would venture that, for any pair of moderately experienced developers, it's almost always possible to find a pair of tasks such that one of them is twice (or even ten times) as fast as the other. Let's not even bring up how much the incentive structure can vary, even among people in the same department.

The example that the article brings is terribly vague and uninstructive. Is that guy, for his whole life, going to be a "1/10 developer"? We never get an idea why he was slow in the first place. Was he lazy? incompetent? concentrating on his studies instead? not motivated by the incentive structure? risk averse because breaking the system carried harsher personal consequences than developing it excruciatingly slowly? The author doesn't even figure out the roots of the problem in the one case he's familiar with, and purports to give advice to everyone else based on it...

<comment><USER3> > So I would venture that, for any pair of moderately experienced developers, > it's almost always possible to find a pair of tasks such that one of them is > twice (or even ten times) as fast as the other.

I completely disagree. The FizzBuzz syndrome is very real: when I do developer screenings, the majority of candidates simply can't program even tiny problems. There's no way they're faster than anybody on my team at any development-related task. And yet, they all have long resumes and a lot of experience. All those people are working someplace. And I've watched these 1/10 developers at work: they copy/paste lots of code, program through trial and error, and spend most of their time in the debugger. Eventually, stuff gets done, but excruciatingly slowly.

Once you reach a certain level of competence, then I think what you're saying is true. But there's a huge number of developers who don't reach that level.

On the other hand, I agree with you about this article. Some sort of insight on where this dev spent his time might have been interesting. Whenever I read things this vague, articles based on vague impressions rather than any hard metrics, I'm left wondering which side was actually incompetent here. Maybe this was one of the 1/10 CTOs, completely incapable of effectively communicating with people who don't fit his favored personality type. And if the feature the dev was working on was replaced with something else that only took 30 minutes to implement, maybe the original design was simply unworkable.

<comment><USER4> The fizzbuzz syndrome is real alright. But someone failing fizzbuzz is not an indicator that they will always be incapable of development. It just means they are very junior and require training. Frighteningly for the West, Indian and Chinese companies appear to grok this and actually develop their employees. US and UK companies throw their hands up in empty self-satisfaction that their work is so intellectually difficult that people up to the challenge are impossible to find. The reality is probably that the corporate business model is flawed meaning they cannot afford the seniority of guy they need.

<comment><USER5> How senior would you need to be to write fizz-buzz? Will someone ever gork that if they didn't after Teach Yourself Xlang in 24 Hours?

<comment><USER6> I doubt is a matter of seniority, its a matter of criteria, the way I see it is, FizzBuzz is useful only to weed out perhaps the lower 5% of the developers population and perhaps the lower 20% of the general literate population?

As an anecdote, I asked my wife, who's not a developer, she is an executive at a large beverage company, to solve FizzBuzz and to explain to me how she would do it and she did it successfully. She didn't use the word "for" or "while", but she explained that she figured there must be something that allows you to iterate over the same algorithm several times (paraphrasing).

Personally, I think FizzBuzz are useless unless you use them as part of a submission form before candidates send in their resumes, sort of like a slightly harder captcha. There is no place for a FizzBuzz once the company is already engaging with the company, if they are not able to solve it they will be earlier signs that they lack common sense and criteria.

<comment> T-hawk > _FizzBuzz is useful only to weed out perhaps the lower 5% of the developers > population_

Problem is, that 5% represents way more than 5% of the pool of job applicants, since it's those folks that continuously get rejected from jobs and keep applying. Any company hiring developers needs a decent FizzBuzz filter to sort out this riff-raff.

> _There is no place for a FizzBuzz once the company is already engaging_

In a technical and sharp company, yeah. In a company where the resumes go through HR and nontechnical managers, such that the first point of any technical evaluation is in the interview itself, then yeah that interviewer is going to need a FizzBuzz. And this is distressingly common in companies who hire some software developers but whose primary domain is not technology, like medicine or shipping or education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For well-defined programming tasks, I could agree that there's a standard "professional" baseline, and that, at most, other developers could be twice as good/fast, at most. (And of course, there are the 1/10 developers too, and even the "negative" developers that do more harm than good.)

But the 10x factor is real. But it comes into play, I think, more for architecture roles, or incredibly key algorithms, etc. It's a whole different beast from "proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain."

These are the developers who have the intelligence, experience, and organizational understand to make the kinds of decisions that keep a team or product running smoothly along, as opposed to getting mired in spaghetti code, rewrites, refactoring, etc. And the larger and more complex projects are, the harder this is, and the more valuable it is. And the more of an art it is, than a science.

The idea of 10x developers isn't that a single developer performs simple tasks 10x better/faster, but rather that they bring such insight into complex tasks, that they can wind up achieving 10x as much, possibly for the whole team, because they make other developers more productive as well. Or, they see a well-defined task, and see a different, better way of doing it, that only takes 1/10th the time. But the 10x is the gain they bring to the company -- and sometimes it is far greater than 10x.

<comment><USER8> this is really well stated.

i've noticed the exact same thing. most programmers at the baseline level of proficiency take about the same amount of time to perform any particular, well specified task. its the stuff that isn't well specified where the huge differences come into effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find this a challenging read. If the guy isn't cutting it in the position he is in, then its reasonable to ask him to move on, but I like to believe that everyone _can_ improve, just as I believe not everyone _wants_ to improve.

In my career I've seen developers who were 'average' become way above average after their boss left. This was due to the weird psychological box their manager had managed to get them pinned into.

A friend of mine who is now a VC told me about dogs which were put into a box where anything they did caused the floor to shock them. Eventually they just lay on the floor quivering. This sounds horrible and cruel (and it is) and sadly I've seen managers do the same things to their people. Every time they try to do something they get yelled at, and never with any guidance just a "don't do that again!" sort of shock from the floor. Eventually they can't do anything.

It is hard to rehabilitate those people but it is possible. It takes a bit of patience to get their confidence back up that they can in fact be excellent contributors. But boy is it painful. Both for them and their new manager.

The bottom line for me is that people work at different speeds and different levels. When their tasks are well matched to their strengths they do well. I once characterized two folks I knew as a 'bubble sort' kinda guy and an 'insertion sort' kinda guy. Strangely the bubble sort guy could write code really really quickly, and that was good because he took a long time to arrive at a solid solution. The insertion sort kinda guy worked more slowly and methodically but still got to the solution in about the same amount of time. If you looked at their commit histories you might thing the insertion sort kinda guy was a 1/10th developer but if you look at the milestone delivery rate you'd see he was just as productive as the bubble sort kinda guy. Not a particularly deep insight that people are different I know.

<comment><USER10> _A friend of mine who is now a VC told me about dogs which were put into a box where anything they did caused the floor to shock them. Eventually they just lay on the floor quivering. This sounds horrible and cruel (and it is) and sadly I've seen managers do the same things to their people. Every time they try to do something they get yelled at, and never with any guidance just a "don't do that again!" sort of shock from the floor. Eventually they can't do anything._

This was a study done by Seligman et al and is known as a psychological phenomenon: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness>

Scarily, even mentioning this brings flashbacks of when I was part of an entire team that was ruined by it. The pattern that emerged was that a particular senior architect who had the ear of management was perceived as the 10X contributor, even though the misdirection and hostility from him reduced the rest of the team to 1/10 productivity. Most of the other developers were entirely capable but realized the complete futility of their efforts in the face of this kind of management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, if the author kindof hasn't seen it, I guess I should ignore this stuff:

Boehm, Barry W., and Philip N. Papaccio. 1988. "Understanding and Controlling Software Costs." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-14, no. 10 (October): 1462-77.

Boehm, Barry, 1981. Software Engineering Economics, Boston, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1981.

Boehm, Barry, et al, 2000. Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II, Boston, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 2000.

Boehm, Barry W., T. E. Gray, and T. Seewaldt. 1984. "Prototyping Versus Specifying: A Multiproject Experiment." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-10, no. 3 (May): 290-303. Also in Jones 1986b.

Card, David N. 1987. "A Software Technology Evaluation Program." Information and Software Technology 29, no. 6 (July/August): 291-300.

Curtis, Bill. 1981. "Substantiating Programmer Variability." Proceedings of the IEEE 69, no. 7: 846.

Curtis, Bill, et al. 1986. "Software Psychology: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Program." Proceedings of the IEEE 74, no. 8: 1092-1106.

DeMarco, Tom, and Timothy Lister. 1985. "Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace." Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Software Engineering. Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 268-72.

DeMarco, Tom and Timothy Lister, 1999. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2d Ed. New York: Dorset House, 1999.

Mills, Harlan D. 1983. Software Productivity. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown.

Sackman, H., W.J. Erikson, and E. E. Grant. 1968. "Exploratory Experimental Studies Comparing Online and Offline Programming Performance." Communications of the ACM 11, no. 1 (January): 3-11.

Sheil, B. A. 1981. "The Psychological Study of Programming," Computing Surveys, Vol. 13. No. 1, March 1981.

Valett, J., and F. E. McGarry. 1989. "A Summary of Software Measurement Experiences in the Software Engineering Laboratory." Journal of Systems and Software 9, no. 2 (February): 137-48.

(References from [http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/Origins_of_...](http://www.construx.com/10x_Software_Development/Origins_of_10X_%E2%80%93_How_Valid_is_the_Underlying_Research_/))

<comment><USER12> Have you read those references? Or are you just quoting them blindly?

Laurent Bossavit has read them, and he reports that they are, for the most part, reporting on each other and on anecdotes. There is no actual, scientific evidence for the "10x programmer." He writes up his search for the evidence in his book "The Leprechauns of Software Development." It's a fascinating look at how a supposedly-rational group of people has taken a myth and blown up into well-known "fact."

<comment><USER13> Have you read those references? Or are you just quoting Laurent Bossavit blindly?

<comment><USER12> I've read and understood the reference I've provided (Bossavit), and I've also read and understood the reference justin_vanw provided (McConnell), so no, I'm not quoting Bossavit _blindly_.

After reading both, I found Bossavit much more convincing. In addition to meticulously following the chains of references back to the original research, Bossavit also examines how science is done and what is required in order for a claim to become established scientific fact. His conclusion is that the evidence for the 10x claim is "quite weak."

Here's my summary of his material from the last time this came up ( <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4118034> ). There's much more to Bossavit's research than my quotes here, so if you disagree, please read and rebut his work directly, not just these quotes.

"How strong is the support conferred to the 10x claim by the best-reputed list of references, for a reader persistent enough to follow the chain of citations back to primary sources?

"Based on our close reading of the "10x files", we can now answer: quite weak.

"Not a single one of the references is to a replication, in the scientific sense of the term, of the original exploratory experiment.

"The empirical data is in general quite old, most if not all of it predating widespread use of the Internet - which we can safely expect to have wrought major changes in programming practice.

"None of the studies address the question of construct validity, that is, how meaningful it is to speak of an individual programmer's productivity, and if it is meaningful, whether the experimental measurements line up adequately with that meaning." [1]

[1] _The Leprechauns of Software Engineering_ explores what science is and how we distinguish between fact and folklore in software engineering. It specifically explores the 10x claim, and determines that it's folklore. <http://leanpub.com/leprechauns>

<comment><USER13> > There's much more to Bossavit's research than my quotes here, so if you > disagree, please read and rebut his work directly, not just these quotes.

Please provide a copy of Bossavit's research.

<comment><USER12> I was using "research" in the colloquial sense, not in the "research paper" sense. Bossavit researched the 10x claims (thoroughly and meticulously) and wrote up his findings in the book I mentioned. You can find it here: <http://leanpub.com/leprechauns>

It's an impressive work of scholarship; many of the citations he followed were out of print, expensive, or referring to unnamed parts of 300-page books. Luckily for us, Bossavit's write-up is engaging and accessible.

It isn't free, but it's trivially inexpensive (US$5-10) if you care about this subject. Far cheaper than the source material.

<comment><USER13> > It isn't free

And isn't available in any of the linked libraries available to me.

And I already had a long email discussion with Laurent back in 2011, about his comments on Steve McConnell's blog.

If I may make a suggestion, when the source material is likely to be unavailable, it might be better to quote the reasons given rather than the conclusions -- then we can try to follow the reasoning rather than having to take someone's conclusions at face value.

<comment><USER12> I don't understand what you're getting at here. Laurent's book (written after McConnell's blog) is available at <http://leanpub.com/leprechauns> . If you're unable or unwilling to figure that out, I suspect you're not really trying.

You're engaging in an asymmetric attack here--posting trivial statements that avoid the substance of my comments, but require me to do a lot of work to satisfy you. I've replied to your comments in good faith. Now the onus is on you.

<comment><USER13> Unwilling to pay the $5.

> You're engaging in an asymmetric attack here <

I wasn't engaging in any kind-of attack, just making a suggestion.

You said -- "if you disagree, please read and rebut his work directly, not just these quotes" -- so, as I haven't read the book, I haven't tried to rebut those quotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is no offer of proof for the claim that there are no 10x developers past claiming "they've not seen it in practice"

I have seen them with my own eyes. They are in fact, able to do things 10x faster than others. There are not a huge number of them, but they exist. At Google, folks like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are easily 10x more productive than "the baseline proficient engineer". Any proficient engineer who has worked with them can tell you the same.

Again, i won't claim there are many of these kinds of folks, but they definitely exist.

(This also doesn't mean 1/10th developers don't exist, and aren't common, but ...)

<comment><USER15> For those who work inside Google, it's well worth it to look at Jeff & Sanjay's commit history and code review dashboard. They aren't actually all that much more productive in terms of code written than a decent SWE3 who knows his codebase.

The reason they have a reputation as rockstars is that they can _apply_ this productivity to things that really matter; they're able to pick out the really important parts of the problem and then focus their efforts there, so that the end result ends up being much more impactful than what the SWE3 wrote. The SWE3 may spend his time writing a bunch of unit tests that catch bugs that wouldn't really have happened anyway, or migrating from one system to another that isn't really a large improvement, or going down an architectural dead end that'll just have to be rewritten later. Jeff or Sanjay (or any of the other folks operating at that level) will spend their time running a proposed API by clients to ensure it meets their needs, or measuring the performance of subsystems so they fully understand their building blocks, or mentally simulating the operation of the system before building it so they rapidly test out alternatives. They don't actually write more code than a junior developer (oftentimes, they write less), but the code they do write gives them more information, which makes them ensure that they write _the right_ code.

I feel like this point needs to be stressed a whole lot more than it is, as there's a whole mythology that's grown up around 10x developers that's not all that helpful. In particular, people need to realize that these developers rapidly become 1x developers (or worse) _if you don't let them make their own architectural choices_ \- the reason they're excellent in the first place is because they know how to determine if certain work is going to be useless and avoid doing it in the first place. If you dictate that they do it anyway, they're going to be just as slow as any other developer.

<comment><USER16> What I learn from this is, they key to being a 10x developer is to work on problems that have 10x impact and not necessarily writing 10x more code.

<comment><USER15> That's the right lesson. The difference is actually even more stark than that: if you extend it out to picking the right project in the right company in the right industry, there're positions where you can be easily 1000x more productive. Project selection probably determines more of your productivity than almost any day-to-day coding decision.

<comment><USER17> I'm sure Larry and Sergey would agree.

The what-to-build skill trumps the how-to-build-it skill every time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you ask me to design a programming language, I'm a 0 and van Rossum and Kernighan and Ritchie are some finite number, so they are infinity-x me.

There are levels where people hit a wall. Some hit it at hello.c, some hit it at writing professional business logic with proper data structures, some hit it at assembly language or programming language design or operating systems.

Anyone in over their head at any level is a 1/10 or a 0.

The superstars of language design, if they had to dive into Java business logic, might be at 2x the productivity of a competent pro...or they might shoot themselves.

But if you create a Python or Linux...what's your productivity compared to that Java programmer? In terms of the market value of those ecosystems, increased efficiency by the developers and users in those ecosystems, it's not 10x, it's gigantic, millions of times the value-add.

The weird thing is, people don't get paid much more when they move from one level to another, unless they start the next Google or get shares/royalties...it's more on a log scale.

<comment><USER19> NO!

You're not a 0 at designing a programming language.

If you look at modern C++, you may think that it's impossible to design that language. TBH, I'd be incredibly surprised if the current standard is implemented on all of the major compiler platforms before the next standard is released.

Remember one of the most important rules in programming and problem solving in general.

If you can't see how to solve a problem, break it into n smaller problems. Repeat as needed until you have a problem you can see how to solve and solve that problem.

You don't need to know lex/yacc, ANTLR, LLVM, recursive descent, LALR(1), or any of that crap to design a language that will be useful for you. They'll give you leverage and have incredible value, but I assure you that you have the ability, today, to design and implement a programming language if you can program at all.

It may not be a general purpose language, but look at languages with minimal syntax, such as forth or a very simplified lisp/scheme. Start by recognizing strings, categorize those strings into your language keywords and program values, and make the computer do something based on the combination. Start with a program that can do something like "print hello" and work from there. You can even add comments by looking for a "#" and ignoring everything from there to the end of the line. You're on your way from there.

Do not hold yourself back by thinking any problem that other people can solve is intractable. The main advantage for more experienced developers is that they can think in abstractions and assemble those abstractions into a solution.

Sorry for the emotional intensity. Sorry also for ignoring the rest of your comment, as it's relevant.

But I care more about your mindset than the argument. You're better than a 0 even if it's just because you understand that you do not yet know something.

<comment><USER18> well... let's just say my 1985 PLT (programming languages and translators) class project didn't run after numerous all-nighters, and I got the grade that made the top 75% of the curve possible LOL. It's possible that another couple of weeks of all-nighters would have yielded something useful, or if I went back now I would get it...in a sense, any program with a few command line options defines a 'language'...still, pretty close to 0 in terms of a product that could be put in production or that someone would willingly pay for. Appreciate your comment though, nobody should consider themselves a zero at anything...with a just-do-it attitude you will always eventually create something useful...what one man can do another can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are a small few very gifted people who are prolific coders, and there are a small few very terrible coders who manage to get a job but can't produce decent work.

But FAR more often than spotting either category "in the wild", in my own experience, I have watched poor management turn a productive developer into an unproductive one, or watched circumstance and luck turn someone who's not natually great into a central and productive team member.

I would say, blanket generalization, that at any company that has more than 5-10 developers, team dynamics and management are 10x more important than whether individual programmers are rock stars or duds.

<comment><USER21> This. People forget the impact of good management, supportive teamwor and morale If worked in a place with the 5-10x devs (at least compared to te rest of the team) but when the workplace is hoatile, people dont eat together, etc. You won't be able to rretain people for too long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In my experience there are both. There are certainly a fair number of 1/10ers that manage to progress through seemingly normal career paths as programmers despite not being very good. I've worked with some, and most of you who are also developers probably have as well. But there are also for-real 10xers on top of the baseline. John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Fabrice Bellard, et al. If you define hyper-productive programmers like those guys as your baseline then like 99.9999% of working programmers need to quit in shame.

<comment><USER19> I think you're spot on.

There are some _really_ bad programmers out there. Many are stuck in IT departments in non-technical companies, pounding out RPG, COBOL, BASIC, and other "maintenance" work that consists of writing reports. They take weeks doing it. It's a 9-5 job that they don't have to think about when they go home.

I sat in a kickoff meeting with a client's development staff. The staff had an average of eleven years of employment in the department. They were starting to define an SDLC for their organization and the topic of code reviews came up. One of the major points of contention for the day was the use of GOSUB over GOTO. (The pro-GOTO people were talking about a bug that smashed the stack, but didn't know it.)

It's safe to say these people are not reading "Hacker News", even in its current form, at 10pm. They read ESPN.com at work.

Even within this sort of environment, individual effectiveness follows the 1/10 to 10x distribution. There are developers who change one line of code, with a clear specification, and take entire facilities out of production for days. Others get in at 7am, leave at 7pm, and work on ripping out as much code as possible to create reusable modules of...BASIC. Most plod along in the middle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm rather tired of this, "developer productivity," rhetoric. It places software developers on a scale that allows micro-managers to perceive people as cogs in a machine. And I don't think that is fair given that we are all capable people. Each one of us will experience times when we are very productive and deeply inspired while other times we will struggle with completing trivial and meaningless tasks. To put ourselves in such absolute figures is disingenuous.

</comment><comment><USER24> Of course there are developers that are vastly more productive and effective than others, this is true of every industry, not just developing. Consider two different developers. One designs and implements a highly useful feature which gives their product a key competitive edge in the market and does so in a way which is elegant, efficient, and robust. The other implements a poorly thought out feature that is a borderline bug even if implemented to spec, takes a long time implementing it, and eventually produces code that is hard to understand and full of defects, sucking up tons of developer time and slowing down development velocity as it soaks up resources every time it needs to be fixed.

The difference is not merely one of a 10x productivity imbalance, it's a huge effectiveness difference on the scale of thousands or even millions of times.

Looking for "10x productivity" developers is a side-show, it's treating software like factory work. Look for developers who can work more _effectively_. Developers who you can rely on to deliver a product that is absolutely better along every axis than the competition. Developers who won't just pump lines of code into the repo but who will actively work to improve the quality of the code base over time and increase the total development velocity of the company. Developers who will take the time to look at the internal processes and tools that the company uses and seek to improve them when necessary. Developers that will serve as strong mentors to other developers on the team, and improve their quality as well. And too developers who will be looked up to and admired and will serve as a reason for why other developers enjoy working at the company.

</comment><comment><USER25> Developers is one thing, but how about sysadmin work? I think I've seen it there, too. I looked at the tickets worked by a group of people from June 1 to December 15 of a year far in the past. The counts looked like this:

119 348 353 409 515 559 572 634 722 779 830 1004 1029 1169 1345 1487 2096

That's a total of 13970 tickets closed by 17 techs. If you split it evenly, that's 821 each, or about 5.8%. The lowest tech only handled 0.85% of the load. The highest tech handled 15%! If you use the extremes, that's a 17x difference. It also means the top tech did almost 2.5x the "fair share" load of 5.8%.

Now, to be clear, tickets are not fungible. One ticket may be simple and another might take days to finish. Still, when there's that much of a difference, odds are the person at the top is doing all of them regardless of the complexity. That's the only way to find enough things to do.

<comment><USER26> My wife worked with a guy who closed a ticket about closing tickets. If you're measured purely on the basis of number of tickets closed, you can game the system. Replaced users mouse, ticket closed. Or, upgraded network software on 300 machines, ticket closed. If someone is doing twice as many tickets as the next guy, I'd assume he is doing a lot of BS work, not that he's twice as fast.

<comment><USER25> Well, yeah, that's why I said tickets aren't fungible.

Still, when you have someone hopping on them as quickly as they're opened while someone else just grabs one every hour or two, something is wrong. What if I told you the "one every hour or two" person was doing the dumbest, simplest ones, while the top tech was doing the hardest ones (in addition to everything else)? It happened.

<comment><USER27> What was the distribution of remuneration?

<comment><USER25> I never had that kind of data, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> All the articles about "10x" developers, "1/10" developers, or "super" developers have not taught me anything about how to improve my skills, or a team's skills. Even the articles that promote the "10,000 hours" or "Just F'ing Do It" mantra feel like proselytizing without practical, or proven, methodologies.

<comment><USER29> Articles are not intended to teach you, they are intended to attract attention to their authors. If you want to learn about productivity in software development, read peopleware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm reminded of a paper [1] that "discovered a test which divides programming sheep from non-programming goats." The claim is that there are two distinct populations of people (those who can programming and those who inherently cannot). Each population has its own variance, e.g. as the OP mentions, the best programmer in each population might be 30-40% better than a lower-tier programmer in the same population. But the average programmer in the "can program" population is a magnitude better than the average progammer in the "can't program" population. This seems to closely match what the OP is describing.

[1] <http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/>

<comment><USER31> This is why I like the news over here. Thanks. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think the author was just plain wrong in his decision assigning that transition task to that developer:

       """ They were just in the middle of a transition from a homebrewed framework into a popular open-source one, which I was intimately familiar with.

The author should have been transitioning the application to the new PHP framework himself. He is intimately familiar with it (and only it?), after all. And that other guy probably should have been assigned some other task, that he could be efficient at. Or let go.

Instead, it looks like this other guy was assigned a task in which he would be very inefficient, and then micromanaged by newly hired CTO. So no surprise that it ended in that huge time waste.

</comment><comment><USER33> _"x10 developers" are, in fact, proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain._

Well, I'd say this is only true for your typical corporate entity, where their products are basically just web applications that represent a state machine using some sort of database store for persistence (which is... basically everything). By the time the company has achieved some size, there's enough process and bureaucracy and projects mostly consist of what the OP described -- migrating from one framework to another, or some other incremental enhancement that's hardly pushing any sort of business of technology threshold. At previous employers that fit this description, I could have easily been 10x more productive if I didn't have to endure four hour sprint planning meetings or be required by an understaffed QA/DBA/sysadmin team to approve my code before release, all to do completely routine development changes that required no serious problem-solving.

This doesn't mean I'm a 10x developer. It probably means I'm a 1x developer, so a 'true' 10x developer would have been 100x more productive without the aforementioned bureaucratic crap. At these companies that would dogmatically follow Agile and had two week sprints, I might spend four hours, across two days, actually developing -- with the rest of the days filled with various meetings, interviews, waiting for QA/DBA/sysadmins, fucking around, etc. I could easily see how someone could spend only 15 minutes on what took me four hours, and his solutions would likely be more elegant. It doesn't matter -- the limiting factor isn't the development time, or even the development quality. In that environment, there is literally no difference in productive gains between a proficient developer and a 10x developer.

Given a "10x developer" is literally defined by his productivity/quality, if you think they're effectively overhyped/nonexistent, ask yourself this: are you in an environment where a 10x developer could actually demonstrate 10x productivity? At most companies, the answer is no, because a 10x engineer is doing in hours what takes people days, and nobody notices. But in the right environment, the 10x engineer will do in weeks what would take proficient engineers months, or do in months what would take _years._ They're the people that Steve Yegge calls "Done and Gets Things Smart"[0] or that Rands calls "Free Electrons"[1].

And if you work at a company that can't think in terms of months because it's always concerned about quarterly earnings, then they have no use for 10x developer, and chances are you couldn't even tell if one was even there.

[0] [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets- things...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things- smart.html)

[1] [http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electr...](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2005/03/20/free_electron.html)

<comment><USER16> Agile is the current day water fall model. I mean in spirit on in factual procedures.

>>I could have easily been 10x more productive if I didn't have to endure four hour sprint planning meetings

I completely understand this feeling. The problem is so plain and simple. There are teams that win because of heroics, they achieve something big. Those management types who lack the chops to be heroes simply try to turn heroics in a process.

So what they basically do is, watch a team win. Instead of realizing its the interesting/challenging nature of work combined with things like lesser distractions, strong deadlines and well aligned monetary incentives that count, they rater look into common set of patterns that they would do. The net result is they end with a really boring process.

If you think to be successful you have to do X, Y and Z steps you are doing it wrong. X, Y and Z are catalysts, enablers or at most methods to keep you sane while you pursue a higher purpose.

My latest irritation is manager types getting too obsessed with Unit testing, it reminds of XML and the way it was abused.

<comment><USER34> >>Agile is the current day water fall model. I mean in spirit on in factual procedures. >>My latest irritation is manager types getting too obsessed with Unit testing, it reminds of XML and the way it was abused.

Whenever I read opinions like this all I hear is "Wah wah wah. I'm old and I don't like learning new things. What's wrong with the way I've always worked? Wah wah wah, managers."

<comment><USER35> Agile has been around for many, many years. I think the Agile Manifesto is a teenager by now. There are a lot of people well into their careers who have "always worked" the so-called Agile way.

<comment><USER34> Sure, but I don't see why an effort to study how successful teams work and distil in a methodology needs to be derided by other programmers.

Most managers I've worked with just wanted some transparency and predictability to the process. Waterfall failed to provide that and now the industry is experimenting with Agile.

I find it distasteful when developers grumble to each other about having to perform basic tasks such as unit testing (TDD, BDD or whatever). I've worked with far too many 1/10x developers to know _some_ kind of process is required to keep them on the straight and narrow.

There is no magic bullet, but I think it's time we stop snorting in derision at the industry's attempts to reduce the unpredictability of building (and maintaining!) complex software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think that any model that bifurcates coders based on skill is absurd; but this description was uniquely outrageous. It assumes that skill is binary, and that there is never any room to improve beyond being a competent developer. If the maximum "level" a developer can attain is 1x, than there is no differentiation between competent and amazing coders.

In all honesty, these scales and the terminology which makes reference to them are absurd. There are average developers, there are mediocre developers, and there are excellent developers. People operate within a massive range of skill levels and have both talents and shortcomings. Trying to express ability as a binary determination made against an arbitrary baseline simply doesn't work.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think its important to note that if we didn't have ten fingers and created a decimal numbering system, we probably wouldn't be using the 10x factor

<comment><USER37> Perhaps, but then our 6x or whatever factor would still mean essentially same thing.

<comment><USER38> Think of how much better programmers would be if they were being measured in base20, though. "There are no 20x programmers, but there are 1/20 programmers!"

<comment><USER37> That would make me automatically twice as good as I am now!

Now I just need to find a surgeon with questionable morals...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> You can't give 10x or 1/10 labels without context. If you ask a smart developer to code in a brand new language, he'll look like a 1/10 developer for a while; and an average developer can look like a 10x developer if he's working with technology that he's been using for the past 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER40> Because _nobody_ wants to be called or to call himself a 1/10 developer! It's goddamn demeaning!

And we're all at different points on the learning curves for different technologies, so we are all "1/10 developers" for some techs! But if you get the "1/10 developer" label for a technology that you end up working with but you've never touched before so you're running in the "learn on the job" mode, some will tend to mindlessly generalize this and you'll end up with a "1/10" label on your head, and _you never want that, especially if you're also freelancing or doing independent consulting and your "fame" has financial consequences!_. You just label the pro/experienced/uberproductive guys as 10x and leave the others to learn and perfect, it has the same "positive" effect that having a "like" button and not a "dislike" one (or both) has on social networking sites. (Now , having "learn on the job" guys working at 1/10 productivity is _horrible_ for the customer, but this is how it works and how you _get paid for learning_ instead of _paying for learning_ by going to a top notch university and/or crawling through badly paid internships - as wise men said, "paying customers get shafted every now and then", but this is how we keep learning and keep our jobs fun :))

<comment><USER41> If you are consultant it is implied that you are at least proficient in technology/tools you are using and learning on the job in that case is quite frankly immoral. Especially if you are not uprfront with your client about your suitability for job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> How to tell whether I'm a 1/10x developer or not? Often it took me 3 months just to get a asp.net web application, as I'm unable to cope with the frequent requirement changes.

<comment><USER43> I was wondering just the same thing. I can build features and ship code, but I'm definitely slower than my co-worker (who has been on the project for over 1 year, while I'm just in my first 3 months).

How can we measure where we fit on the scale?

<comment><USER44> A lot of the productivity difference is probably due to overall familiarity with the code base. In a year from now when you have to fix a bug or add a feature you will probably know where to go and have an idea of what needs to be done rather than having to go hunting for it or asking another developer. If a project is started from scratch I imagine a lot of difference in productivity is due to familiarity with the tools, frameworks, api's, etc. used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I guess I don't get it. This Ph.D candidate was recommended by the previous CTO and was the one spearheading the framework transition...and then was fired after 2 weeks? But junior devs at the previous firm were given months to get up to speed?

<comment><USER46> Sometimes it's not about the person, it's about the team and environment. I've been both on the competent and not-so-competent sides, and the environment I'm working in made a ton of difference (note: it is a feedback loop, so mistakes and lack of delivery cause your environment to get tougher, and vice-versa).

Perhaps the guy felt he was going to get a raw deal and so was spending the few weeks looking for another job? Who knows. Lots of potential variables that might have turned an otherwise stellar coder into a quivering mess. The plural of anecdote != data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not sure what to make of this post.

I'm a 10x guy when it comes to Java/Python/Perl. And I'm also 1/5 guy when it comes to something like a executing a large C project[Which I'm currently working on in my spare time in the nights, totally apart from my day job]. Actually I was 1/10 guy a while back. I'm now at 1/5. I give it another 6 months while I be the 1x guy. And it will take some years when I will hit 10x mark when it comes to C.

However this 1/10, 1 or 10x metric is bull crap. There a lot of people who work slowly and steadily and then come to speed. There are a lot of people who learn by making mistakes, there are people people who take time figure out things and go at their own speed.

My metric of measuring is how to check how much committed the person is, are they deeply into it, are they serious about it, how much effort do they put in. To they persist on their effort despite problems? If they do, you have a winner. Doesn't matter if he can't understand the C syntax or takes a while.

Its worth while to give such candidate some time. Because sooner or later they turn out of be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER47> Something seems a bit off about that anecdote to me--exaggerated perhaps?

There's a "highly recommended", "smart", Ph.D candidate developer and he can't do in 6 weeks what the author could do do in 30 minutes, even with the author holding his hand? That's not a 10x difference, that's a 500x difference.

<comment><USER48> Yeah, I've worked with quite a few ppl like this. Usually they are very smart, read programming books, blogs HN, etc. and interview very well. The problem seems to be motivation, as the author pointed they face a problem and don't have the will power to keep throwing possible solutions at it. Or the motivation to write those 500 lines of CRUD and simple business logic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> A lot of this comes down to the company itself.

Let's just put it out there. If you are working for a consulting company (let's just name the big ones - Accenture, IBM Global Services, Fujitsu Consulting, etc..) it is NOT in the best interests of the company for their developers to be a "10x developer" or even a "1x developer".

Usually these companies have set an expectation on how fast development will go. If its big government projects, icebergs might move at a faster pace than development.

Working as an employee or even on contract on some of these projects, you learn pretty quick what the "pace" needs to be. These companies don't make their money by doing the speediest development.

</comment><comment><USER50> Let's say we redefine the definition of a developer to baseline at what's currently stated as 10x. What if the demand for programming far exceeds the supply of 10x devs? Fact: the above sentence isn't actually a hypothetical, it's the current state of the world.

You know what? At the end of the day, it IS harder to teach someone to fish than to fish for them. This is a known fact. This is why developing talent is an investment. You don't just get to reap the rewards from the get go. You invest and hope for a high yield. The person you let go sounded like they had great potential (wrote decent and working code, but just a little slow).

Stop being so damn arrogant.

<comment><USER51> 2 weeks vs 30 minutes is "a little slow"?

Sounding a bit mercenary but if the ROI on your investment is not high then you abandon the investment and find another one.

It sounds like this developer was not returning a good enough ROI (and believe me I hate using that term with regards to people) on the educational investment being made into him, maybe they needed him to get up to speed quickly and it just wasn't happening.

<comment><USER50> Not when you are talking about human resources. There is a very large up front investment in order to train people up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'd in no way claim I'm a 10x developer. Hell I question whether I am a 1x developer, but it's not really as simple as that.

First of all the notion that 10x doesn't exist is sorta crap. This may come across as pretty shocking but I don't dedicate every waking moment to development. There is an expectation from many people that being a developer is a 24/7 job and a lot of kids buy into that. If someone spends 10x the effort of me because they honestly feel their career is more important than the rest of their life, then I wouldn't be suprised if they were considerably more productive.

I like to think effort correlates to intelligence and skill but I guess it isn't that simple either. Many people learn certian things, while I choose to focus on others. In the end we may emerge somewhere in the middle but everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. Thus whether you're 10x more productive than me depends on the domain of knowledge which we're utilising.

Folks judge productivity differently. Sadly this often comes from a managment perspective which relates directly to the speed the thing they wanted first appears to them as usable. That's fairly logical from their point of view, but we all know it's folly. Personally I live in a world of duracell bunnies coding up a mess without any thought of security of maintainability. More often than not management tend to believe they're more productive but in reality they just make everyones life harder in the long run.

Finally it comes down to motivation. I'm working a crud app for day rates, I'm in no rush. That's not to say I draw it out longer than it should take but I work my hours at a reasonable pace then I go home. Give me an interesting problem and maybe a vested interesting in completing it and I'll work harder and work on it at home. Suddenly I may be that 10x developer you were talking about afterall, though I'm probably not going to spend my entire life like that.

Personally I think it's pretty silly to propagate the myth that people are useless if they aren't as quick as others. Sure the scale is huge, but the real problem is people aren't rewarded based on their value but based on crappy metrics like "market rates". Next up is even if management were willing to reward based on value, it's actually very difficult for them to do in the vast majority of cases.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think the problem is that the author has normalized his development standard to proficient coders in the tech industry. I used to do enterprise software in the midwest and there are legions of 1/10th developers out there. Its easy move your baseline far away from the average when you are in the echo-chamber of high-tech startups. Compared to the true average developer there are definitely 10x developers.

<comment><USER54> I think the author's point was we should start calling a spade a spade.

Stop calling the 1/10th developers normal baseline and admit that even thought they may be the majority of developers, that doesn't mean we should accept that as the status quo.

I imagine this phenomenon is common in most professions. They are tons of accountants and arborists out there. I wonder if they have the same ratio of 'able' to 'efficient', or if some professions are better or worse.

<comment><USER55> I once had a professor who remarked that if you have a large enough population, the distribution of their skills will form a normal distribution. The difference is that, in some fields, the difference between a genius and a dud is much smaller than others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'm not a 10x programmer. Probably will never be. I do know of programmers who not only are slower in shipping, but are very bad at designing coherent programs and data structures. That's my main observation. It's not that I'm X times better, its that they are X times slower and make poor design choices. Why? My experience has shown that this _tends_ to happen with people who stop keeping up to date and stop learning.

Let's take my current job, for example. I'm working with a Python program designed to interact with 2 other programs. It is a middleman. The input comes in as text files, and the output goes out as text from a SQL query. The two programmers who built the system I'm working with (one from IBM, another from NASA, believe or not) had never heard of XML, or JSON. Every data structure inside the system is handled by reading and slicing around the contents of the text files. Slow, error prone, and tedious. My first step was to clean this up. I now have a small script that takes the input data text file and turns it into JSON. Since this data comes from an outside vendor, I don't get to pick the format (though I'm developing an API to handle this). After cleaning the data and saving it as JSON, I then simply load up the JSON file into memory and go through the program flow without issues. I removed the size of the program to about 25% of its original size. Plus its way, way faster. I also removed a bunch of database queries that simply did nothing. Was even able to add logging to the program.

Anyhow, the crazy part about it is that the actual code was worse. For those who know Python, using global variables for everything is considered pretty bad form. Here is an example that mimics the code base I inherited:

        #they called lists arrays
        an_array = []
        def foo(array):
        global bar, global hello, global hi
        if bar <> 1:
            print "something"
            array[0] = hi

Yeah. But wait, there's more. There is a web app written in (what else) flat PHP. It handles very critical information, and is plagued with:

        $foo = $_GET['foo'];
        sql = "INSERT INTO TABLE.NAME VALUE($foo)"; //not actual SQL

They never clean, or sanitize the data. They don't even check if the GET array is empty.

It is obvious these two programmers stopped learning. They simply fell into what I call a _learning slump_. Where all new data simply goes out the moment it goes in.

        #Like so
        def new_data(data):
            return data

        #Instead of
        def new_data(data):
            #process data
            #insert data into database

Yet, I don't want to call myself better, because most people here are better than me. Yet this leaves me with quite a strange view of everything. I'm not a great programmer, but I'm not as bad as those guys who worked at some big name place. Where does that leave me? Who knows.

<comment><USER57> I feel I am in the same boat as you. I belive myself to be a very average (possibly less so) developer.

Even believing that I cannot understand the amount of crap I have been forced to rewrite because it simply does not work.

Just recently a expensive contractor was brought in to write a series of simple CRUD screens using .NET MVC and KendoUI. It appeared to work, but if you even scratched the surface you quickly discovered it was almost totally broken. Further down it consisted of one big class as a service layer, raw SQL rather then LINQ, and a jumble of interdependent hell. I spat the dummy after 5 days of fixing bugs (trying to avoid changing too much) and scrubbed each page one after the over and ended up with something modular which I could actually support. It took me 2 weeks to scrub (80% of the codebase was touched or rewitten) what took this contractor 3 months to write.

I am with you. If that's normal (its not the first time this has happened to me) then what sort of dev am I if I know I am not a rockstar?

<comment><USER58> I don't mean this offensively, but this has a bit of a whiff of NIH syndrome.

Rewriting and refactoring existing code is a _lot_ easier and quicker than writing it the first time, even if it's someone else's. Unless you saw a massive drop in TLOC you were probably just rewriting it into your own style. Looking back on my own past, I am guilty of doing this myself more than once.

And raw SQL vs the Entity Framework is not a reason to judge code. There's a lot of warts on that thing still, though I do use it in moderation. LINQ and the EF are two completely different concepts btw which you seem to have muddled. You can use LINQ or the LINQ extension methods with any IEnumerable, not just with the EF ORM.

<comment><USER57> No that's fine. From the above it does sound like it.

Normally I would agree, but I really couldn't fix bugs in this code without re-factoring majorly. It really was that bad. I wouldn't have minded so much if we hadn't supplied the guy with a sample which showed how he should lay it out as well.

I may have gained a boost from his code (I did literally just scrub the codebase and reused a lot of had a change a heck of a lot too) but im certain I didn't gain 3 months from using what was delivered.

For the SQL portion we explicitly told him to use repository pattern using Entity Framework which he totally ignored this requirement. The moment I saw raw SQL in our models I really cracked it.

Of course the above could have been fixed with a decent peer review process but I could write chapters over what happened there. Suffice to say I saw the code once, made many requests of things to fix and was never invited to review it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> If you don't have your existing coding team involved in the interview process for new people, then you are looking for trouble. The net cause is either your own poor processes and resource allocation (ie. bad hire) or weird internal procedures/standards (overwhelmingly difficult for newcomers to grapple with).

Anyway, '10x your tier of productivity'-style elitism is pointless. People will always either accept new colleagues or get shirty ... there is no objective metric for the infinite range of potential human foibles.

That said, removing someone too early could easily prove a loss ... often people who think differently are a 100x asset. If you can influence an important resource allocation decision with interesting information, then saving both a month's time and the potential alternative productivity for a bunch of fellow developers could easily pay for a hire's first few.

Software's complex, mmkay. Humans are even worse. Chill, we are all flawed creatures :)

</first-bottle-of-red>

</comment><comment><USER60> If there are 1/10 developers, there are, in fact 10x developers.

Guys, math and stuff.

In all seriousness, there's a lot of things being done in the productivity and quality spaces to try and mine data to measure things. I recently joined tenXer (.com) which is trying to both drive productivity measurements as well as quality indicators.

We by no means have any answers, but I think things have evolved a lot in the recent years to where bringing real measurements is becoming a possibility.

I think the important thing here is to realize that measuring people is not solely for someone to manage you differently. You can't succeed in something if you don't have a reasonable success metric, and data makes it far easier to capture those.

</comment><comment><USER61>
        [ ] What separates the 10x devs from the 1x? (what _is_ it? Environment, skill, ...)
        [X] 10x productivity myths (why you shouldn't believe it)
        [ ] 10x productivity truths (but, but, it IS true, see?)
        [ ] Be the 10x developer (aspiring to be one)
        [ ] Startup perspective (should startups try to acquire 10x devs?)
        [ ] Why the 10x notion pisses me off (why it shouldn't matter)
        [ ] If 10x productivity why not 10x salary? (or similar)
        [X] Some meta discussion on the metrics of "productivity" (solve for x)
        [ ] Technologies/Languages/Tools/Methodologies that facilitate/impede 10x?
        [ ] 10x in other professions?

</comment><comment><USER62> From my recruiting experience and from asking around others who do programming during recruiting, there are 30% programmers that can't program even simple problems (FizzBuzz, String reverse)

</comment><comment><USER63> "but the difference between developers who are proficient at what they do will never be a x10 multiplier - it will be closer to a variation of 30-40% in productivity"

If you look at individual productivity you're right, but the effect of the myhthical 10x developer is not just on their own work but on the work of others in the project. You could in some cases get a 10x at the project level. It's the difference between working smarter versus surface level efficiency such as better time management.

</comment><comment><USER64> Are we to suppose that Fabrice Bellard, Steve Wozniak, and John Carmack are merely proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain?

<comment><USER65> well, the latter two of them seem to have created their domains from scratch, back in the day. Now that they are done with the trailblazing and lots of other smart people crowded in, who knows where they stand in comparison to the right tail of the bell curve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Isn't it obvious that people who use dual monitors, take time to set up projects, one step builds, thonl before coding, think about their work be more productive then who don't. What I feel is productivoty isn't magical which a programmer has, it is driven by how much obsessed the programmer is in increasing it ( too much obsession wont be great though ).

<comment><USER67> What you're describing (not counting dual monitors, which is a complete non- sequitur IMO) is just basic competence. When people are talking about 10x, it is more a matter of knowing what to do and how to do it.

As a simple example, consider implementing a shuffle from scratch. The inexperienced programmer will muddle about with loops and random statements, a few false starts, and probably after a morning or so will end up with something that is slower than necessary and perhaps not quite as random as it should be.

The experienced programmer will say "Fisher–Yates shuffle!" and have a top-in- class implementation ten minutes later.

The 10x programmers I've known were experienced like that in seemingly _everything_. I'm pretty sure I'm an above average programmer, yet I could routinely save myself hours of work by consulting with them for five minutes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is interesting, but I feel the author did not get to the meat of the issue yet. He suggest to relabel the 10x to 1x and 1x to 1/10x. Which to me just leads to a discussion about whether the glass is half empty or half full.

I think the interesting question is, why is it that 1x is generally regarded as default while 10xers are regarded as special.

</comment><comment><USER69> "You can tell when someone 'gets' it and when someone doesn't."

Can someone explain this in more detail please?

</comment><comment><USER70> Irrespective of languages (verbose vs non verbose), I have found that the rate at which I code on a normal 8 hour day is 500 LOC of medium complexity code including testing effort - and it has not changed for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER71> Why can't both be true? If you actually had some objective measure of programmer skill, wouldn't you expect there to be some kind of bell curve of skilled programmers, with 10x and 0.1x people somewhere at the tails?

</comment><comment><USER72> Having a hard time buying this theory especially given the article's anecdotal evidence. If someone spent 2 weeks trying to program something that took him 30 minutes that is over a 100x improvement.

</comment><comment><USER73> I think there are 10x developers because the vast majority are 1x.

<comment><USER74> I'm of the same view.

I think there is some fuzzy logic going on here: If the majority are 1/10 developers (as the op asserts) and thus form the baseline x, aren't the 1/1 developers by definition 10x developers?

<comment><USER73> haha exactly... It doesn't matter at what number you set as the baseline. We would say a developer's productivity is an average (mode perhaps) of all developers' productivity. There are a percentage of them that are 10x more productive.

Its much worse than that in my experience. Some people won't be able to jump over hurdles no matter how hard they try. I'm like that for making a website look good (pre-boostrap). I'd eff around an entire week on swapping colors and changing pixels sizes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> It doesn't take much time wasted on Twitter, HN, or chatting up co-workers of the opposite sex to turn into a 1/10x developer

<comment><USER76> So are you saying if you are a man, that talking to a woman makes you a 1/10x developer? Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER77> Hah, I don't think the parent post is literal. The point being that it's easy to be a 10x developer if you have 10x the focus.

<comment><USER76> Lets just be lucky the poster wasn't at Pycon

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> What's the difference so long as it remains true that some developers are 10 times better than other developers?

</comment><comment><USER79> if progress in software dev is limited by bottleneck problems that stop progress or slow it to a crawl, then large multipliers in productivity are possible and limited by the scale of the problem...

</comment><comment><USER80> Is a 10x developer the same as a "10 star" developer?

</comment><comment><USER81> so what do i have to do to shift from 1/10 to 1x ?</comment>


Instagram apologizes to users: We won't sell your photos - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57559890-93/instagram-apologizes-to-users-we-wont-sell-your-photos/ <comment><USER2> Wonder if this episode caused many account deletions. I deleted.</comment>


Pragmatic rules of web accessibility that will stick to your mind - <AUTHOR> https://medium.freecodecamp.org/pragmatic-rules-of-web-accessibility-that-will-stick-to-your-mind-9d3eb85a1a28 <comment><AUTHOR> A refresher on web accessibility (ADA, WCAG, WAI-ARIA, impairment types and exclusions) and 3 practical rules that will stick to your mind and give you guidance on implementing a11y in your project.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a good platform for mobile web app - <AUTHOR>

Can you guys recommend a platform that will make life easier to develop simple mobile web apps for iOS and Android? I was looking at Sencha, but I know there are quite a few others. Also, what's an easy payment option to integrate? Tnx <comment><AUTHOR> From a quick look it seems like phonegap is used for making appStore apps. I was thinking of building a mobile web browser app. That's why I was looking at Sencha, which apparently uses phonegap to access data on the phone. [http://www.sencha.com/learn/Tutorial:A_Sencha_Touch_MVC_appl...](http://www.sencha.com/learn/Tutorial:A_Sencha_Touch_MVC_application_with_PhoneGap)

</comment><comment><USER2> Just to add a combination of jquerymobile and phonegap has allowed us to deliver native iphone, ipad, android and mobile web app from the same codebase. Pretty sweet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe this will help, too:

<http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out <http://www.phonegap.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> jQuery Mobile is very easy to pick up and pretty efficient for simple apps: <http://jquerymobile.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're used to web development and in specific manipulating the DOM with jQuery, then you might be more comfortable with jQuery Mobile.

If you're a programmer who's experienced with MVC and building native applications, then go with Sencha Touch.

Sencha/Ext is far more robust than jQuery Mobile, and in an object-oriented, programmatic fashion defines your application, with Sencha taking care of the DOM for you.

I highly recommend this tutorial to get a feel for how Sencha's MVC works: [http://www.sencha.com/learn/Tutorial:A_Sencha_Touch_MVC_appl...](http://www.sencha.com/learn/Tutorial:A_Sencha_Touch_MVC_application_with_PhoneGap)</comment>


Ask HN: Which documentation tool creates stripe.com like modern docs? - node-bayarea <comment><AUTHOR> I can't say for sure exactly what Stripe is using, it could be a custom built static site, or they could be using one a static site generator with a custom theme.

Some tools that you can use to build doc sites similar to stripes off the top of my head:

GitBook - [https://www.gitbook.com/](https://www.gitbook.com/)

Hexo - [https://hexo.io/](https://hexo.io/)

Docute - [https://v3.docute.org/#/](https://v3.docute.org/#/)

Gatsby - [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/)

VuePress - [https://vuepress.vuejs.org/](https://vuepress.vuejs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi,

Check outmkdocs.

[https://www.mkdocs.org/](https://www.mkdocs.org/)

They have some great themes and you can get pretty close to what you want. Easy to use and quite powerful.</comment>


Onion: New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users' Ears - <AUTHOR> http://onion.com/ddvPUy

<comment><USER2> Best one yet!

There actually is a service that lets you make a free phone call after watching an ad, called Bondd (Dutch): <http://bondd.nl/bondd/phone/index.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> These are more contextual than targeted :)</comment>


Will Tech Companies Ever Take Ethics Seriously? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/will-tech-companies-ever-take-ethics-seriously-35d991f9f839 <comment><USER2> No, because they are companies.</comment>


Student-founder conducting research on problems people face in crypto - <AUTHOR> I'm part of the Create-X program at Georgia Tech. I'm conducting research to identify problems people face with crypto and products/services people use in crypto.
I'd really appreciate it if you could take this 2-minute survey: https://cryptoresearch1.typeform.com/to/Ao9z1g
Your responses will help me figure out what the biggest problems are that consumers face with crypto today. I will analyze the response data and summarize my findings in a research article, which I'll post here.
I've posted similar surveys on Reddit back several months ago, received >400 responses, and wrote this Crypto Investor Behavior research article: https://ryzecrypto.com/resource/ryze-research-crypto-investor-behavior_5d9b7a3f7feda85616e7c3ad (Please don't read the article before taking the survey, as it may create response bias).
Thanks in advance for your time! <comment><USER2> Done! Your previous article is super interesting, thanks a lot! I'm a founder of a crypto trading tool startup, so info like that really helps understanding who are my customers :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lack of valid use cases

Too many bad actors

Terrible UX</comment>


RIP, Dennis Ritchie, Father of Unix and C - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tagxedo.com/rip-dennis-ritchie-father-of-unix-and-c-58975

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3105526>

</comment><comment><USER3> can i get a t-shirt?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't think it was appropriate to turn this into a revenue opportunity so I didn't offer that option. In fact, in the blog article, I intentionally took out the standard "tagxedo.com" attribution text in the image so this is a pure tribute instead of an advertisement.

However, I was thinking of making a different kind of tribute, which is to allow you to turn your _own_ C/C++/C#/ObjC code into a word cloud artwork in the shape of the blue "C", and make a T-shirt/mug/bag out of it (via Zazzle). Of course you can already do that if you know how to use Tagxedo, but I presume most people don't. Stay tuned if you are interested.</comment></comment>


Zenodo: An Open Science Platform - <AUTHOR> https://zenodo.org/ <comment><USER2> This looks more like another Covid aggregator.

What do you mean by open source platform? The page doesn't talk about open source or a platform</comment>


20GB leak of Intel data: whole Git repositories, dev tools, backdoor mentions - phoe-krk https://twitter.com/deletescape/status/1291405688204402689 <comment><AUTHOR> > If you find password protected zips in the release the password is probably > either "Intel123" or "intel123". This was not set by me or my source, this > is how it was aquired from Intel.

Can't say I'm surprised, people are lazy.

Another large tech company I used to work for commonly used an only-slightly more complex password. But it was never changed, so people who had left the team still could have access to things if they knew the password. It was an entry point into the system more than the company's Red team.

<comment><USER2> Password protection may have been used to bypass antivirus and other filters. While you should treat dumps like this with a lot of suspicion, treat password protected zips with a heaping dose of care as they may have been used to evade automated defenses.

<comment><USER3> Yes - but not for hostile purposes, but because your own company's antivirus won't let you mail an executable to a colleague.

<comment><USER4> Usually this. Or in my workplace, an image.

Antivirus are some crazy shit that may trigger on any random action and will teach people to follow the most unsafe procedures without questioning, so they can get anything done.

<comment><USER5> I've heard it put this way: If you force users to trade convenience for security, they will find a way to obtain convenience at the expense of security.

<comment><USER6> > If you force users to trade convenience for security

I _wish_ it was better security they were making the trade for. It often isn't though. These programs are large, expensive, and don't do much most of the time. I feel there's a perverse incentive for developers to make their AV products as noisy as is possible to justify their own existence.

And yet.. even with full AV rollouts locked down at the highest level, bad actors still get into networks and exploit them. So, to me it feels like our users are trading away their convenience for our misguided CYA policies.

<comment><USER7> My guess/fear is that most AV software gets deployed because some insurance policy requires you to tick that box.

<comment><USER8> A lot of this stuff (AV software) is getting deployed at all different layers of the environment. Firewalls are getting better at dynamic file analysis and file blocking, the endpoints are loaded with user behavior/analytics, av and dlp tools. AV is so omnipresent because it's in a decent amount netsec appliances these companies stand up

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At a previous workplace we had a few places in the code which used the word backdoor. It was not an actual backdoor though, but merely a debugging server that could be enabled and allowed you to inspect internal state during runtime. At some point I removed the word backdoor, fearing it would get to a customer or during an audit someone would misunderstand. :|

<comment><USER10> Once I got a complaint from a security auditor that some code was using MD5. It wasn't being used for any security purpose, just to check whether an autogenerated file had been manually edited. We decided it was easier to do what they wanted than argue with them, so we replaced it with CRC32C. That would have been faster than MD5, but nobody cares about saving a few milliseconds off reading a configuration file at startup. It would have made the manual edit check somewhat less reliable, but probably not by much in practice. But the security auditor was happy we'd stopped using MD5

<comment><USER11> You don't actually need to listen to auditors. People like you (who can't be bothered to argue because it's apparently too hard) is the reason that smartass is still selling their services.

<comment><USER12> So much this. My company just got done shelling out a ton of money for some asshat to tell me that we can't use http on a dev server. <head smashes through desk>

<comment><USER13> It's worse when the asshat convinces your manager that every internal site, whether dev or not needs https. Certs everywhere. Our team spends a decent % of our time generating and managing certs...

<comment><USER14> I am confused. Isn't that easily automated?

<comment><USER15> It's not easily automated. Somehow, you have to safely get a certificate across the air gap to the internal network.

So I guess an internet-connected system grabs the certificates, then they get burned to DVD-R, then... a robot moves the DVD-R to the internal network? It's not easy. It's all much worse if the networks aren't physically adjacent. One could be behind a bunch of armed guards and interlocking doors.

<comment><USER10> An airgapped network can include its own internal CA, and all the airgapped clients can have that internal CA's certificate injected into their trust stores, and all the services on the airgapped network can automatically request certificates from the internal CA – which can even be done using the same protocol which Let's Encrypt uses, ACME, just running it over a private airgapped network instead of over the public Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Someone have a mirror? Seems the actual files are here:

[https://t.me/exconfidential/590](https://t.me/exconfidential/590)

Edit: files are here

[https://mega.nz/folder/CV91XLBZ#CPSDW-8EWetV7hGhgGd8GQ](https://mega.nz/folder/CV91XLBZ#CPSDW-8EWetV7hGhgGd8GQ)

or

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:38f947ceadf06e6d3ffc2b37b807d7ef80b57f21

<comment><USER17> You can't download from mega.nz unless you have their "downloader" app or an account, or if you have Firefox or Safari. It's useless.

The torrent works.

<comment><USER18> A web app that only works in non-Chromium browsers isn't useless.

<comment><USER19> I've downloaded stuff from MEGA in the last week on a Chromium based browser, so I'm not sure what the problem is supposed to be here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is more embarrassing than harmful. Having worked at companies like intel, it's not really that damaging leaking some of this IP - the worst that happens is some open source project gets slightly better or you have a few more bugs (not that Intel are lacking in that area). The second we see internal marketing, pricing & road map slides- that's when you know they're in real trouble.

<comment><USER21> > _Having worked at companies like intel_

I've worked at a company very much like Intel¹ and the _really_ closely guarded secret — the one where two vetted people turn the launch key at the same time — was the microcode patching keys.

¹ I'm not saying it was Intel, but it was Intel

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fingers crossed that this will enable some smart person to completely disable the management engine.

<comment><USER23> AFAIK the ME is required to initialize the processor so it can never be completely disabled. The best you could do is remove any code beyond necessary initialization which has mostly already been done by me_cleaner.

<comment><USER24> How easy is it to use me_cleaner? Last time I looked it required some wiring and a Raspberry Pi.

<comment> amiga-workbench Quite straightforward, I used a ch341A SPI programmer. Just make sure you take multiple copies of your original ROM image and compare the hashes of them to make sure there was no screwup.

It took me about 10 minutes to do my ThinkPad. All I lost was some enhanced integrated GPU power management and integrated thermal management, but I use a userland fan control program anyhow.

<comment><USER25> How much did it cost? Everything

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Intel denies it was hacked: [https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/1291461942624677889](https://twitter.com/TheRegister/status/1291461942624677889)

<comment><USER27> ... They're claiming it came from an NDA'd source of IP that's shared with customers.

Given that it _appears_ like there are backdoors in this Firmware code, we can conclude that if there are such backdoors then they were shared with numerous customers.

That really doesn't improve the optics of the breach.

<comment><USER28> Alternately, as others have noted, it could be overloaded nomenclature and doesn't actually indicate a backdoor. Which would be an excellent reason for them to feel comfortable sharing said 'backdoors' with their customers.

<comment><USER29> It it is actually a backdoor but only gets put on prototypes/engineering samples or similar.

Or maybe some well documented Intel management features need to backdoor there own security mechanisms to work.

Or ...

Well the point is it's a starting point for someone dissecting the data but not much more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is releasing this legal? It seems like this person isn't really disguising their identity or concerned about breaking the law. In their profile they even seem to brag about leaking company's code.

<comment><USER27> Of course it's not legal. This is exfiltrated intellectual property being shared without license.

<comment><USER31> I don't believe this is accurate or in any way obvious even if this is the stance the courts would ultimately take. These files were downloaded from a publicly available CDN server discovered while browsing the internet. No authorization mechanisms were bypassed, no computer systems were hacked. These files are the result of a GET request to an Akamai server that happened to be hosting the files. Despite how this will be spun in pop culture, Intel did not secure access to these files. I'm not sure how you would prosecute someone for re-sharing a file they were given, under no legal contract, when they asked for it.

<comment><USER32> You have a lot of faith in how technically versed the law and courts are on these topics - because they sure haven't kept up with the times. And even if they were willing to split hairs over these technical details:

No civilian will agree with you that just because _technically_ you could slip through several doors that happened to be not locked and got helpful advice from a neighbor, it doesn't mean that whatever you found behind those doors was "public" just because you didn't have to pick locks. Or that the photos you took of private company documents by social engineering your way inside must clearly be unsecured and publicly distributable because "they were given to me when I asked for them".

<comment><USER31> This isn't slipping through various open doors. There _were no doors_. This is literally a public server on the public internet serving files publicly. Intel is grossly negligent in securing their assets if they're hosting what they consider to be confidential trade secrets on public CDN servers.

The analog would be if I posted a flyer on a telephone pole with what I considered confidential information and someone else took a picture of it. There's no way you could argue that I had a reasonable expectation that only people for whom the flyer was intended would be able to view the flyer.

If someone deliberately bypassed computer security measures to acquire this information I'd agree. But you don't get a free pass to be negligent just because you're a big company. I suspect the EFF would support my viewpoint as they supported Weeve's appeal of a much more contentions and ethically gray scenario (the acquisition of personal information from a server that was negligently "secured" and required someone to imitate the calls an iPad would make).

<comment><USER27> > This is literally a public server on the public internet serving files > publicly.

The flyer analogy does not work because the services were not broadcasting or otherwise advertising their presence.

Following the house analogy, the thief tested all the front doors on the street and opened those which were not locked.

<comment><USER31> Then search engines must not be legal. They crawl the public internet and index what they find.

What you're effectively saying is that the flyer is unknowable unless a Street-view car drove past and snapped a picture of it and its owner engaged in SEO to make sure it landed near the top of search results.

There is no "house" in this analogy (which you might call a corporate/private network secured or otherwise). No private network was accessed. This stuff was on the street, in the free pamphlet section of the newspaper stand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> May be a good time for Intel to open-source FSP anyway. They've been dilly- dallying around it for a while now. There were some phoronix articles about it a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://twitter.com/deletescape/status/1291422841834016770](https://twitter.com/deletescape/status/1291422841834016770)

Hmm…

<comment><USER35> I'm completely ignorant about this but is it possible that they're referring to a "debugging backdoor"?

<comment><USER36> It's most likely a callback from OS to firmware, or at least this is what I can guess based on the single comment present in the screenshot and what I saw in the past in the APEI tables of Intel-based servers.

APEI tables are a part of ACPI that tell the OS how to write an error record persistently in the machine log, inject a memory error for debugging purposes, and stuff like that that's tied to the RAS (Reliability/Availability/Serviceability) features of a server. The tables contain a list of instructions like "write a value to memory" or "write a value to an I/O port"; the way they work in practice is that, by following these instructions, the OS causes the processor to enter system management mode (that's the "backdoor" into the firmware) where the firmware services the APEI request.

Since the tweet mentions SMM and RAS in the two lines it shows, my guess is that it's related to that functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Who should we follow on twitter / blogs to read analysis of whether this is impactful or interesting?

</comment><comment><USER38> The bad news just doesn't end for this company,does it?

<comment><USER39> Or karma finally doing it's thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This kid has been posting these for fame (it's the same guy that posted the Daimler leak). I guess it's all fun and games until he finds himself in prison

<comment><USER41> That is indeed often the case with young narcissists (I don't know if it applies to this person, don't know him/her).

That said, I remember the shocking arrogance and total disregard (for anything but their own ego) of a few young privileged "hackers", who were involved in DDOS services for hire, and also for some very nasty IoT bot net (if I recall correctly).

Krebs wrote about them quite a bit. I think they even got caught because of that, but not sure. They did loads of real damage, that much is certain. But instead of going to jail, they got community service. Apparently with intervention of the US government, for which they now work. Go figure.

<comment><USER42> IDK if wanting a bit of fame and validation makes you a narcissist per-say.

<comment><USER41> Not per-se, indeed. But if that urge for validation is for something that's fundamentally wrong and/or only supports an person's failure to critically assess their own actions, then it usually is narcissism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> With stuff like this being exfiltraded (let's admit if hackers got this they prob could have a whole ton of fab secrets) it won't be long until America's IP is all in the hands of China/Russia/Europe.

We will have confirmation when China launch a 'Xi Lake' x86 compatible cpu...

<comment><USER44> They already have it, thanks to AMD, before Trump blocked further cooperation.

</comment></comment><comment> greyface- Any IP lawyers in the house willing to speculate on how this is going to go down? Intel surely isn't going to let this stand, and the (Swiss) leaker is being completely open about their identity. What's the legal action going to look like?

</comment><comment><USER45> The three "biggest deals" here are all... a lot less important than they look. Clarifying info on all three:

"Did Intel get hacked?" I can't confirm the exact mechanism by which these files got out, but I _do_ know that these files are things which get shared externally already with Intel's customers under NDA. If security _in general_ is lax, that's one thing and future hacks of more sensitive stuff could be expected. If security in general is fine, but for _some NDA customer sharing channel_ is lax, don't expect to see anything juicier.

"Intel123 is an awful password." Yes it is, but... it's not _for_ security. Intel123 is the password used to bypass executable/script filtering systems that overzealous IT put in place to "protect" employees. Employee A wants to share a zip with employee B. There are _many_ channels they can use to do this, because the contents of the zip are not encrypted or restricted. None of these channels require encryption, but either A or B doesn't like/understand them, so they agree on email. Whoops, the filter says that executable could be harmful and out it goes. Zip-via-email doesn't work. Unless... well, if they put a password on it, the filter doesn't catch it. Good. Problem solved. This is _so common_ that the convention Intel123 arose and solidified for exactly this purpose.

"I see the word 'backdoor' in there!" Sure. Bad name choice. That's not the kind of backdoor you're thinking. There are a lot of things in the firmware that take this exact same form and don't use the word backdoor. It's a _signal_ the low level firmware is keeping an eye out for, and if received, it will trigger some other piece of firmware to do some task in SMM. If that other piece of code takes input parameters and fails to verify them, _then_ you may have a vulnerability on your hands - in fact, this was a very common kind of vulnerability before. Intel has fixed a lot of these over the years. Odds are they're mostly gone by now. If input parameters are verified (or none taken), the worst you could do is maybe a DoS by spamming that signal to keep the CPU clogged/stuck in SMM.

</comment><comment><USER46> At this rate, I fully expect Nvidia to make a meger bid for intel.

<comment><USER47> Bigger market cap but something like 10 times less revenue, strange world (As intel get hammered in the media their revenue remains in a different league to AMD - which I suspect is partly because AMD can walk the walk after dropping their trousers but there is no foreplay [i.e. sales and software])

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is more of an advertisement for all the cool stuff you can work on if you go work for Intel than anything.

</comment><comment><USER49> In what ways can an end user of intel processor expect to benefit from this? I'm guessing none, since ever consumer interface is already a standard ... Can anybody chime in?

<comment><USER27> Optimistically, the exposure of backdoors in the firmware may cause Intel to patch and close them.

Realistically, Intel will patch the firmware and replace the backdoors with new ones.

<comment><USER49> Besides the backdoors I mean, I was thinking about performance or usability improvements...

<comment><USER50> Might finally get certain big PC vendors to consider using AMD which will increase competition and make sure we get better hardware in the future..?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Intel leaked sources contain "backdoor" keyword

[https://twitter.com/deletescape/status/1291419918685147149?s...](https://twitter.com/deletescape/status/1291419918685147149?s=09)

<comment><USER52> I've only seen people writing "backdoor!" without actually saying what kind of, for who, to what and so on. Seem pretty disingenuous to me. Could easily be something trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The FSP source code is supposedly leaked as part of this, which is used to initialise the memory controller. Are we closer to (modern) blob-free Intel platforms?

<comment><USER45> Close _R_ , yes. Close? No. For one, memory init code differs from product gen to product gen and pulls in platform/board specific libraries and inputs to set up some parameters. The bigger problem though is just how _big and messy_ the memory init code is. It would take a substantial number of people a substantial amount of time to unwind and understand what's going on, let alone do a sane and/or clean-room implementation of it all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm not touching the binaries or executables, but I'm interested in the source code. Has anybody found anything interesting?

Will download from the mega link and explore in a VM later.

</comment><comment><USER55> Intel went open source today.

</comment><comment><USER56> Anybody else wondering at the rate of bad news around Intel at this moment? Like, is someone after them or is this just bad luck?

<comment><USER57> Personally it seems more like complacency and cultural rot has caught up to them than any bad actor - excluding their own management chasing ego gratification or short term profits. Falling behind AMD in so many metrics when they were previously often a second-best rival screams that they need to get their shit together.

<comment><USER58> This. Inertia, tech debt, a less nimble culture all add up.

Intel needs to kick off a skunk works that basically gets funded well enough to find a new way.

If they do it now, some space could get really interesting again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The advice to try a password of "Intel123" on any protected files says it all.

This organisation genuinely deserves whatever is coming for them.

<comment><USER60> This type of passwords are use in almost all big corporations. People are being asked to encrypt things but without password managers or keys management tools.

<comment><USER61> Yeah, I know of plenty of other companies with similar multi-time-use passwords. The data in that zip file probably isn't that confidential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'd love an IPR lawyer to explain legal paths to clean room spec of the bits of this which could be useful like ME or coreboot depending parts.

I see comments which says "stay clear, they will" but I would like to know how, if at all, this could be done and be legal on the receiving side of the functional spec from a clean room.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm very curious about this. What's the legality on just reading on this for mere curiosity (e.g.: I don't work for AMD nor write drivers, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER64> That's just another internal Meltdown from a Spectre employee !

For once they don't leak our data.

</comment><comment><USER65> if you're at a company that can be considered an Intel competitor i would avoid this like the plague. Wasn't there problems for people working on Linux after only viewing source code from other operating systems?

</comment><comment><USER66> Binaries unique to SpaceX, maybe related to a server or contract with SpaceX?

<comment><USER67> I've _heard_ that it's apparently SpaceX camera drivers?

<comment><USER66> That's what it says in the docs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Cisco123

</comment><comment><USER69> The next Edward Snowden.

<comment><USER47> Unless they've actually found a real smoking gun, probably not even close. Besides, even if there isn't a backdoor in intel CPUs they've definitely tried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Why would they include stuff from proprietary releases?

I understand exposing backdoors and all, but who cares about a camera firmware for a airgaped system?

wonder if some of the clients for those devices is involved and the goal of this is that those clients got fed up with the NDAs and wanted all this in "public domain"?</comment>