> ability to instinctively and intuitively design elegant and correct solutions to a given problem while introducing minimal bugs.
That is very important. Code that is not written is just as important importat (maybe more important) than code that is written. What I mean is good programmers will find way to solve something using less code. That is very imporant for understandability, maintenance, and long term support.
That is hard to convey to an outsider. Say a manager who has never programed that is in charge of evaluating programmers they are managing. They will usually value more code, more nights spent at the office and more churn fixing bugs vs less code, less nights spent at the office, no churn or "putting out fires". Heck to them it looks like the 10x programmers is a 0.1x programmer compared to others.
>What I mean is good programmers will find way to solve something using less code. That is very imporant for understandability, maintenance, and long term support.
It's not about less code, it's about simplicity of code. I have known people who have played code golf with production code, either out of bordom or a desire to generate job security. That's not actually solving the core problem of making it easier for someone to port to a new version of an OS in 5 years time, it only looks that way if you aren't paying attention. Short code can be just as confusing as long code.
Your code should, in all places where it is not necessary to do crazy speed optimisations, be understandable by the average intern. Yes, that means comments, and yes, sometimes it means doing something in one line that is more commonly done in 20 lines and yes, sometimes it means taking 20 lines to do something you could do in one line.
That is very important. Code that is not written is just as important importat (maybe more important) than code that is written. What I mean is good programmers will find way to solve something using less code. That is very imporant for understandability, maintenance, and long term support.
That is hard to convey to an outsider. Say a manager who has never programed that is in charge of evaluating programmers they are managing. They will usually value more code, more nights spent at the office and more churn fixing bugs vs less code, less nights spent at the office, no churn or "putting out fires". Heck to them it looks like the 10x programmers is a 0.1x programmer compared to others.