I’ve written about this in the past… I believe I was a 10x programmer but that was in the days before being a 10x programmer was a thing. I was in Portland for a job interview with Intel. The interviewer wanted to know how many lines of code I’d written that year. I think the number was approximately 30K and the only reason I knew it was because I had counted them. (comments not included)

Years later I was working on Workplace OS/2 and I was responsible for about 2M LOC in a combination of ‘c’ and ASM. I could reason my way through the entire code tree in 2-3 days depending on what I was looking for and at some point I had a pretty good index in my head.

No days the notion of a 10x programmer is not quite urban legend but there are plenty of programmers who think they are the uber of programming. The truth, however, is that most 10x programmers simply spend more time in front of the computer than not. A 10x programmer is one that does 10x the work in the same amount of time. If a 10x programmer worked 80hrs then that would effectively make them a 20x programmer.

I’m no longer a 10x programmer but I write a lot of code in my head before I start committing it to the codebase. I also work as many hours as I need in order to get those ideas out of my head and into code. I’ve also moved everything to a higher level… writing low level ‘c’ code means that some large percentage of code is just plumbing where something like bash or tcl gets the work done. So my work, while written in golang, is actually mostly written in a DSL that I wrote in golang. Now that the DSL is working well enough I write extensions, test cases, and implement those extensions in whatever project I’m working on.

Don’t worry about being a 10x’er. Just get the work done and practice your craft.