The Demise of 10x Dev | Prime Reacts 

Its amazing how I didn't even know prime a month ago and now he is the guy I watch and listen to the most daily. Blessed to have a veteran like him guiding me.

How many kids today get to start tinkering with their computers and programming through things like Minecraft mods or Roblox games? There's still plenty of opportunities to get into computers from a young age.

10x developer often means you are working 10x more than you need to

I can't help but feel like there's the potential to develop a very real addiction with all of the seretonin releasing feedback loops we have

Why use Git when you can just use USB sticks? 10x DEV

My two favorite reasons for 'why do we do this to ourselves?' that you appeared to miss were 'autism' and 'inertia'. Autism would be mine.

Programmers create for a living. It’s one of the very few creative jobs that big companies will pay you to perform-that has its own pros and cons. But ultimately we still want to create, and that comes with a certain level of selfishness. We want to create what we want to make, and we want to do it our way. Often love, family, and even basic tasks like eating and sleeping-anything that takes time away from the process begins to feel like a burden. Many of the greatest creators also struggled the most with this side of life. Physicists, musicians, writers, actors-all notorious for creating at the expense of their personal lives.

as a zoomer who has been programming for a while it's not a generational thing where "us kids" don't care about code quality - rather as someone in college right now I believe that this is a side effect of more accessible programming education. it's pretty easy to get through comp sci 101 and 102, and it's also pretty easy for those who do to think they have learned enough - after all that mentality is what the rest of school teaches us. It's not that there are less enthusiasts, it's that there are more people who can choose comp sci as a career/major. Side effect of comp sci going mainstream, if you will. At least this is my take on it. I'm an EE major in college and a enthusiast programmer but I didn't want to major or work in the comp sci field - I find EE much more interesting. Similarly there are EE students who aren't enthusiastic and generally don't perform as well in class, not sure if correlation is causation here. My point is that the niche enthusiast only industry was rare to begin with, and as comp sci became more accessible the seasoned veterans are just seeing the result of more people in the field.

The end of this video is - unironically - the most motivational piece of advice I’ve listened to. This is what people should be striving for.

Brother I love you and your content, you had given me so much guidance and inspiration as a youngster in the field, thank you

TL;DR: the author has ADHD and thinks he isn't "special", he's just a millennial programmer, thus "back in my day"ing his way to believing that Gen Z has no enthusiasm The first half of this article is ADHD + bad educational experiences + beginnings of burnout. I had the "luck" of being labelled as "gifted" early on in life, which provided the needed motivation to love learning. Listening to this article made me realise that I'm finally on the other side of burnout; I'm getting out of it. I hear what he's saying and recognise that a past version of me resonated 90-something% with it. Burnout fucks you up, but it pushes even more growth. The second half kinda went off the rails though. I think he fell into the classic fallacy of over-generalisation and making conclusions based on perception. As a member of the "new generation of programmers", the people I talk to who are actually invested and good at programming are the ones who are passionate about it. In fact, I'd wager that getting better at coding brings that passion out in a lot of people. I've anecdotally observed people that started with 0 coding knowledge and end up enjoying the brain workout. I've also seen people get something akin to math anxiety where there brains just halt whenever they hear anything technical.

I resonated deeply with your dishwashing comment and the need to succeed. I was in the same position personally; my wife being two months pregnant, still in college for computer engineering, completing a coding Bootcamp at the same and transitioning to the agony of job search and the algorithm grind. Children does change you, and consider myself lucky to have managed a well paying software engineering job when she was 9 months old. Love your content, very insightful

I'm a father too, and I couldn't agree more. My sons completely changed me.

demise of the 10x developer, and rise of the 'GIGA-CHAD-DEVELOPER'

working from home has me motivated to be a 0x engineer. Of late I just can't be f'd doing anything lol

Content like this why I subscribed. Great work Prime!

I've been working as a developer for over 2 decades and I've contributed to many open source projects. One thing I've noticed is a lot of programmers are people who are socially awkward with poor social skills. In Apache there are tons of people with a natural inclination for programming, but don't have basic social skills. That often results in flame wars on the mailing lists with egos blowing up. Writing code fast is a terrible measure of "is this person a good developer?" People like these should talk to a therapist and work on the other parts of themselves. In fact, everyone should see a therapist on a regular basis. I tell this to young developers that I mentor. that blog sounds a lot like flame wars I've seen on apache mailing list. this obsession over 10x is stupid ego wanking. I've worked with people who considered themselves 10x. Guess what they weren't actually 10x. The real 10x programmer don't give a shit about that stuff.

14:50 I feel exactly the same way. There are LARGE amount of projects I attempted to start in college, and once I went off script or attempted to do something on my own, I would get a lot of bugs and errors that would result in more bugs after fixing them. Discouraging me from trying to learn something while also feeding into my Imposter Syndrome along with other issues I had at the time.

I love the advice you gave at the end of this video ❤

There are still enthusiast programmers today, it just isn't all of them.

Great Video! Thanks for uploading Prime

Thank you for the last words. They are so wholesome!

After thousands of failed projects, smiling at my daughter, being content in just trying out new stuff even if it does not lead anywhere slowly, and trying to make my work a better place for all my collegues, bad or good in coding, I wholeheartedly agree to every single word of the outro. Bless you, mate.

thank you for making me pause the video and finish my work

I love this video when we can think more about our career, what it's really to be a software engineer, and see there're people with different perspectives... It's like stocolmo syndrome, you live every day, the same things that became reality in your life but ins't and someone need to say!!

I mean this sincerely: you are a "philosopher programmer", and it is refreshing and at times enlightening. Thank you, Prime.

I also am a developer that predates the 90's, 1982 to be exact and we basically had nothing. You needed to build your software yourself if you wanted something. In a time that no one knew what a computer is. When you have build software from the ground up, created your own version OS32 in assembler, created your first text to speech in 1982's with a special text to speech chip. You know your things around and how to rebuild civilization after a nuke attack by takin,g spare CPUs from a washing machine. Nowadays developing is 80% bureaucracy, pushing tickets and using someone's else's nuget library. to export a "" text string. It is a complete different kind of developers. From time to time I try to share my knowledge, but if it is not somehow connected to a book then they get lost in understanding what I try to explain. For them I sound like a crazy old guy 🙂 And I have no problem with that, I keep my brain sharp during my off-office time. I don't think that modern day developer will ever be able to create exciting things, because their brain never got trained in finding solutions on their own, they always need some help of an external library or else their days are doomed. I think modern day developers will be get surpassed pretty fast by even younger generation. I don't think they will last for decades. Just throw away developers for companies.

What? Arch users can get dates all the time: `$ date`

I think a good comparison to look at to gain some perspective is the much more mature field of Mechanical Engineering. In the early industrial revolution, pretty much all mech-eng was was a bunch of mad scientist types coming up with crazy contraptions and doing so with obsessive zeal. Then, as machines became ubiquitous and lucrative, up to the present day, mech-eng became dominated by smart people doing a regular 9-5 job. But, there are probably about as many if not many more of these mad scientist types in mech-eng, but you'll find them either still making crazy contraptions in their garage or specialty mechanics shop, or working in R&D or aerospace. I have worked in the auto industry, R&D, and aerospace, and the "types" of people you meet are so obviously distinct, but everyone is happy where they are (and if not, they know where to go). I do think that this guy's frustrations (or whatever) are at least real in one way, which is that soft-eng is undergoing growing pains right now where people aren't happily sorted out. For one, the industry hasn't really figured out what the equivalent of R&D is, i.e., the cutting edge where "enthusiasts" can blossom, nor has it given up the delusion that every new app or feature has to be treated like it's the next frontier. And also, the industry is, for a lack of any better alternative, putting many of these "enthusiasts" into management position. Both of these will cause impedance mismatches and frustrations all around. On the one extreme, 10X'ers hate being stuck in a bloated company department in a team dominated by people who don't share their passion for the craft. On the other extreme, you have 1X'ers stuck in "greenfield" projects that forces them to work more than they want to and are probably going to fail and be shut down, sending them back onto the job market, when all they want is a good job where they can put in an honest day's work. The software industry is too much of a mess still for people to find their happy place. It will take a while to sort this out (hopefully not 250 years).

The awkward kid that preffered to be in doors and at a computer. YES!!!

"Undiagnosed and in need of touching grass and being told that they are fine the way they are as long as they let others live their lives", the Blog. Its wild that he asks the correct question right out of the gate: "Why do I keep doing this to myself?", goes into great detail on how his behaviors make him a good programmer but also miserable, and then concludes that Zoomers doing things differently than him is a great tragedy that will destroy software forever. And that doesnt even touch upon the fact that his 10x-brain somehow cant figure out proportions. The enthusiasts are still there and they are still doing enthusiast things, but they make up a smaller fraction of all developers than before because the industry has grown massively and needed to become more accessible for people to develop cheap and fast solutions that can be discarded and replaced just as quickly. I dont know where you have been this whole time Mr Searls, but welcome to the world of software mass production. Its been... going for a while now... not sure how you missed it...

I’m in my 20’s and this was a wake up call for me. I have some self imposed insane deadlines for my projects. Me overworking myself was def a contributing factor to my divorce.

Hot take from experience: the lowest quality code I have ever had the displeasure of having to work with was written overseas by overpaid contractors. It was React in Typescript, and it was a complete nightmare. None of the things they did in that code made any sense.

11:25 I am the opposite. I am a terrible speaker and beginning with a certain number of people (depends on their eloquence but on average I would say 5 to 6 people) there are only two ways I will say something: You ask me something or somebody says something (normally something which I think is stupid) which prompts me to just straight up interrupt somebody else like they wouldn't be saying something.

At :52 your screams are like the sounds I make when I'm doing any normal programming.

I struggle a lot with finding something 'greater than myself' to keep me going. Unfortunately, I can't have kids. I've been searching for something else to fill that void, but it feels pretty hopeless sometimes.

I think one point that the people writing the article might have missed might be how much the tech industry has grown over the year. Even if the ratio to programmer coming into tech for loving programming and those who are only there for other reason might be lower than it used to be, correct for the growth of industry it might be that the number of enthusiastic programming might just have increased. The feeling of a generation gap might just be the affect of thing moving out of it's initial niche for niches often attract the ones that are most dedicated towards it.

The lack of a "because I can" at 3.10 in this chat is giving my quantum soul an existential crisis! I've also done this; I spent 2 years working on open-source projects in my free time while holding down a job, that was 8 years ago. I'm still doing it today with other projects, and I have no regrets :) One difference is that I love learning; it's the primary (if not only) motivation behind all my personal projects. When a project no longer offers anything new to learn, I typically lose interest.

that dolphin vocabulary at 0:46 is right on point prime. I must say you don't just look like the two time. you know his ways too

again, i got a wife and a son we all use Arch, it is not a problem, the only problem i got is i can't stop telling people i use Arch i use Arch btw.

Just my luck to start enthusiast programming at the end of the era of enthusiast programming 😵

wow. the last thirty seconds spoke to me

People just need friends and exposure to different settings. As a leader (or company owner), the key is to get everyone involved with interacting liaison meetings. Or take a trip to a theme park or do mandatory extracurricular events. It might help struggling individuals to get out of a rut. It might help them find a reason to keep on doing life (or help them find a purpose).

I was definitely socially awkward and anxious but not upper class. I got my first computer when a business threw theirs out in a dumpster. I pulled it out, took it home on the public bus and enjoyed playing Ski Free. Eventually discovered BBSes and found a copy of a book teaching QBasic in the discount bin of a bookstore. The rest is history.

I'm pretty sure that's what the article is saying (although I could be mistaken). It's saying that people are breaking "the mold" of the past. I'm currently going to school for CS (in my 30s) and the CS nerd culture that I grew up with in the US is different now. I just assume it's because the US is becoming more diverse. It just means we have to participate a bit more in forming the culture rather than having it handed to us. It's how a culture evolves. Some people don't like that. Personally I don't like those people. Don't be a consumer of your culture, be a creator.

what about -1(00)x devs who use gpt4 to write all their code and design and architect their systems 🤣

This video landed at the right moment for me. Currently completing a Full Stack Diploma after falling into development from the side door. My final project is a React/Django app and I am not exaggerating that the "walkthrough" project for React consists of 25 minutes of video, in some cases literal copying and pasting of code. This includes using things like useMemo, useContext, axios Interceptors and other things that I know are not suitable for a beginner. I understand roughly what they do. Everyone on the course as far as I can tell has been advised to follow along the walkthrough for their own final submission but feels like a carbon copy of the tutorial and feel like ive learned very little.

Cool, I also worked in Sears in 2018

His hypothesis on newer programmers coming into it for the money is absolutely spot on. How could you miss this Prime? Another symptom of this is how YC went from being filled with hackers and enthusiasts, to being basically an Ivy League alternative for that particular demographic which prioritizes Ivy Leagues and Big 4 consultancies. Programming is now an A tier job, like it or not

I think the article has a point; not that there are less enthusiast programmers, I think there are probably a lot more enthusiast programmers now, but that a smaller _portion_ of programmers is enthusiast. And like... that makes perfect sense. The people who started earlier are naturally the early adopters who care a lot. People starting now might be people who also care a lot and just haven't started till now because they didn't realize or didn't have the opportunity (or, as a subset of that, just... weren't born/mature yet), but there's naturally going to be a lot more people picking it up because it's an incredibly cushy job.

Funnily enough, I am the EXACT opposite of the text highlighted at 13:44. I am a great learner - I just absorb information. I love learning new things. But when I have to *apply* these things, that's where I struggle and go through the whole 'having to force myself'.

thats not DHH scream thats how his F1 sounds like

pacman -S kids

10x insinuates that the person is way better at programming, but we're all good at some aspects and bad at others. It's about perspective and timeliness because an onlooker could be amazed by some of your work and disgusted by some of the other stuff you've made, depending on the circumstances.

'simultaneously accessible and scrutable' means you can touch AND understand their juicy innards.

You may not believe this, but I too was once a dishwasher. I did it for 8 years while trying to be a rapper. You can still find the results on my channel. I just realized at a certain point about two years ago that the hip hop world didn't want to hear about all the scientific stuff happening in my head, but programmers probably do. So I made a foundational pivot in my habits and lifestyle and became what this guy is describing. Before, I had been applying a similar approach to music and not getting very far. Even though I made some excellent friends in the process, it always kinda felt like more was needed from me than just the thing I was passionate about. Alas, passion is all-consuming for people in my sector of the autistic spectrum, but once I finally got diagnosed as an adult and realized it wasn't something I'm able to change about myself, I decided the move was to just make the effort to shift my passions into something that provided more monetary value. That said, I'm now two years in, sitting on a full stack framework that I wrote myself and $0 in my bank account while I clack away in a corner of my dad's house. I can network applications, but please god somebody help me network with some clients.

the guy whose doomed to push the boulder for eternity is sisyphus..

31:50 The 10x developer is the one who finds a reason to not do the work at all. Too many developers are afraid to questions designs or plans.

Totaally agree about kids. Absolutely puts things into perspective makes you work harder, more efficient, within a time frame to be available in the rest of your time

I was the same as you. When we had our daughter, I started doing 40 hours, and not a minute more unless it is an emergency.

Older guy complaining about kids these days. What else is new.

there's no arch wiki page on how to get a date so it's impossible

for a second the chat mutatet to the money crab meme

Yeah for me I think you hit the nail on the head. One other thing, I think a lot of devs are bad at setting boundaries and saying no. A lot of times we get just as overworked by work as we do doing things in free time.

For me computer had the potential to make life easier. And then I got hooked. Just how you would define "passion" aka suffering for a thing

3:02 ain't nothing but a heartache!

the "I'm bad at learning" and the "I used a hard to use, buggy, badly documented SDK" at the same time is just impostor syndrome :D

I agree so much with having kids changes your priorities and forces you to adapt a more healthy work/family-division.

"I develop in Ruby". Is anything after that worth listening to?

As someone who spent their entire life with unmanaged ADHD, denying that it was even real, and wondering why life was so hard or why Id get so obsessively involved in things I shouldn't be so involved in while everything else was falling apart.... I got some news for this guy.

because of the hit i get when it finally works

I wonder if part of the issue here is that Prime's perspective is shaped by his working at a FANG company (btw)

22:40 Programmers in the dev community make up a minority in the industry. Even outside of Silicon Valley, I've found the author's points about pursuing this profession for the money to be true. The pandemic was a microcosm of this, when most Americans felt the least financially secure. That is only second to now with out increased interest rates and sky-rocketed housing expenses.

I want to see one on the rise of the -10x developer.

Who else got into programming by opening developer tools inside an excel spreadsheet and writing subroutines to automate spreadsheet tasks?

"because I can't sing or dance" - rocky balboa

The guy is literally me.

I think the reason I like and am good at programming is because it literally counters my rampant autism

Damn, there's a lot of hard truth in this one

This guy sounds a lot like me! I recently found I have ADHD and this dude has all the big markers. The thing I found is that some people have worse than others, so when one person says "I used to do this and I willed myself out of it" it may only apply to his specific level of handicap, some worse-off people won't be able to do the same unfortunately.

It is all in your head!

The author describing their routine might as well have wrote "I am pre-diabetic". Usually these types are not good at taking care of themselves or their living space

30:53 goated take. Literally best programming take I've ever heard. I live in a "bespoke solutions" environment. Absolutely miserable.

Sears baby! Ditto… former shoes salesman 😊

I think the greeks got it right 1000s of years ago. "Everything in moderation including moderation"

19:58 just looking at how your chat reacted earlier most are motivated by money primarily. In fact I am currently teaching a friend and its pretty obvious that their main motivation is money and its almost enough to want to duck out of this industry and to find another. It is bordering on heart breaking. Aside from the mess they are haemorrhaging into our code, the increased religiosity, the higher noise floor of nonsense on line targeted to these people I would disagree. There is a lot wrong with that. So much in fact that it's hard to even enumerate.

9:18 cheers for the hot take. I’ve been delaying having kids for many years because this is me too…

8:40 subscribed

adopting new technologies is never the problem, the problem is abusing any kind of technologies and going maximalist with them like "everything is an object" or "everything is a callback"or in the case of modern web dev "everything is a react component" or they wanna over-engineer everything, that is the problem, this is the 10x engineer problem, the one that wants to include a convoluted nesting of 10 design patters to show off how much he knows about design patterns. adopting new things can be a win-win if you do analyze it on a case by case basis, some thing can be adopted immediately others can be adopted progressively, etc.

+1 for the tough love at 25:15

I think Prime missed the point a bit here. It's not there are no zoomer enthusiasts or that suddenly people lost the drive to write clean, good code. It's just that 10-15-30 years ago there was many more hardcore enthusiast types in IT jobs and the culture was much more insular. There is more people who treat programming as just a job - they want to get through their tasks, push that PR and then not have to think about it after work. This does lead to conflicts with old-hat guys who may be perplexed that someone rolls their eyes at them talking about new language features introduced in a new release of whatver language. The conflict isn't just about overtime or passion vs. just doing your job. It's also about moving the profession from the realm of highly specialized computer wizardry for uber nerds to something more of a good blue-collar job. The wizardry stuff gets reserved for things like AI. If you're maintaining some frontend profject for a company or writing automated tests for same project, you're like closer to a blue-collar qualified worker than the "use magic spells to talk to computer" hacker stereotype.

I feel like I get where this guy is coming from to some degree. But I'd bet that the number of enthusiast programmers hasn't shifted one way or another. With the explosion of money in the space, the number of non-enthusiast programmers has skyrocketed, so if you look at the ratio of enthusiast to non, it'll look like a stark decline.

I think tutorials for programming should mainly focus on showing you the ideal structure of a program's implementation and then provide an API reference from there. If there are some unique patterns the creator envisioned for implementing a specific feature, that gets tossed in the 'examples' folder of the repo (something I need to get better about providing for my own tools, come to think of it). The rest is supposed to be a learning process because A) Whoever made that tool shouldn't be expected to explain to me how programming in general works and B) if you aren't taking the opportunity to learn from your tools by testing the limits of their capabilities, you don't understand YOUR capabilities when using them.

Mike, whenever you say ‘There are so many young enthusiast developers out there!’ or ‘There are so many young developers who care about code quality’, i can’t help but be reassured that you really must live in a bubble. I’m 23, doing it professionally for almost 4 years now. Got to work with lots of engineers +/- (usually due to my age +) 10 years from my age. Working at my 4th company, in my 9th team: the vast majority is here for money, they don’t read books but fucking articles, they spend 0 time outside working hours on programming. They like to use this damn phrase ‘clean code’ when referring to what code ought to be, yet having little to no clue how to really write it in clear, readable, maintainable, extensible and scalable way. They learn git commands without bothering to learn it properly. They’re scared of rebasing. They rarely learn from code review comments nor from their own experience! The author of the article definitely has valid points with which you didn’t agree. I don’t know where you see this handful of prominent young fellas, but hear me out: the issues with my generation of developers the author writes about are more real than you think

I like how you, while talking about 'not OCD', highlighted the sentence from back to front, missed the last character and had to also not highlight the first character. I had to realize that it was not me doing it, despite my intentional focus and conscious agreement with what was happening.

I'm 15 and coding in my whole time for fun, who else?

He outlines the enthusiast and you constantly talk about how that's how you used to be but you aren't any more, you make the best case for the demise of the 10x, and how being obsesed makes you neglect family and the things that really matter.

It's like Dostoyevsky's man with a toothache. He loves to talk about his toothache. That's why we do it to ourselves - so we can talk about our toothache.

I go to bed late, dream: I KNOW HOW TO DO IT !!!! Wake up, run to the computer..... Spend 5 hours only to realise either, 'I've already tried this' or 'the dream made no sense in the first place', My sleep deprived brain is getting used to blocking out the trauma I will try to sleep again... and again I will dream of solving the problem... :_( Why do I do this to myself? because I am unable to kill the dream.

He had pc, now kids have raspberry pi and arduino. Much more open and cheaper way to learn CS. Entire article is written from the perspective of a grumpy grandpa who doesn't tolerate any change. "Kids are doomed because of social media! Let's ban them before it's too late!" vibe.