this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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I thought it was a good article. Well-written and reasonably well-argued. That said, I think that he missed a couple of things. I had a whole wall of text in preparation for my own blog post, but during the edit it really came down to a couple of things.
I think the industry's obsession with 10x programmers is really about the quest and desire for mastery. Mastery is something that exists in any field, so that means we can look to history for comparisons.
He argues that mastery is disappearing. My opinion is that what he's really seeing is the normal lifecycle of any industry that leads to less dependence on mastery.
Everything from furniture making to mechanical work has gone through the cycle. People doing what they need out of necessity, people getting good enough to offer their services on the market, masters arising from the truly dedicated and/or obsessed, shops run by masters to increase output by using the labour of apprentices and journeymen (and budding masters), and, finally, factories.
The difference between a master's shop and a factory is critically important. In a master's shop, everyone is gaining skill in the profession with mastery always possible to achieve for anyone with the right combination of desire and talent. In a factory, tasks are broken down into their component parts so that mere repetition and maybe some automation is enough to make extract masterful work from the process instead of depending on individual mastery.
Your local mechanic's shop, especially if it's a dealer shop, has more in common with a factory than a master's shop. A race team is where you're more likely to see a master's shop in operation.
I think that what we are seeing is the transition from masters' shops to factories.
There are still passionate people becoming master mechanics or furniture makers. I think the same is true of 10x programmers. But the tools some of those master programmers build will help everyone else do higher quality work and the processes they develop will eventually enable the extraction of masterful products from well-engineered processes executed by low-skilled people and, of course, automation in the form of AI.