I can work with people who recognize this in themselves. not everyone loves to program, but the most important thing is having team members I can rely on. You do your fun stuff at home, I do my fun stuff at work. I got someone at my work who doesn't really aspire to do anything more than he's told to do, but he's there when you need him. I just have to remind him not to burn himself out. I wouldn't say it to his face, but we do need people to do the boring work.

My favorite thing to do as a programmer is to make tools for people like him. I like to make his job less boring and less annoying. I want to automate as much work, and leave him with data to make better decisions with. Then he spends more time making informed decisions on what to do, which is more enjoyable.

Your examples are of top tier "rock stars". That's the same argument about programmers that we're having. There is "I made a program", and there is "I made a great program". The difference is in programming, there is a thing called technical debt. Average programmers create technical debt almost faster than I can fix it.

i'm just happy the primary people that I work with can understand what I'm talking about and can understand my vision and know when to ask me questions. But get some other programmers from other departments, and they don't ask questions. You ask them to do something, they make it work and nothing more. Pass in something unexpected and their code goes to shit. Brittle code with lots of undefined states. Pure crap.

They were born interested and mindful. I believe that intelligence is a bell curve, but interest is not. Anyone can be smart, but most people's personalities won't let them.

Yes and no. Yes, we shouldn't give up on them. No, someone getting an A on a programming assignment, but takes them 3 days, when I can finish the assignment in 1 hour, it not what I consider "getting it".

Making a program work is only 20% of the job. It's great they have a better understanding and appreciation for the work that goes into programming, but keep them away from me.

Drawing talent was replaced with cameras or Photoshop filters. If you want art, you need to get to that 0.01% of the population.

And if you're not born with this motivation? Unless you're saying people can be motivated at gun point to become great programmers. Self motivation to want to learn is a mental trait of a programmer. Everyone else will eventually be automated out of a job.

I think my problem is when I say "programmer", I mean someone who understands everything, full stack. what does the distribution curve look like when you limit it only to people who can design, build, maintain, and successfully secure a high performance datacenter all on their own, but only from the aspect of the computers, network, and programming, not datacenter layout, power planning, etc?

The 10x rule assumes you have a lower limit on your worst.. No matter how many people you throw at a problem, if they do not understand the problem, you won't get the job done. When it comes to programming, nearly all problems seem simple at first. A big part of my job is arguing with people to keep them from painting themselves in a corner. Feature creep happens, you need well defined designs and functionality. I want my code to not only break, I was it to break early, break loudly, and tell me exactly what the issue is. I spend more time designing my code to break than to work.

Then why do so many "programmers" not have these skills?

The problem is that too many programmers don't realize that they don't have these skills and pretend that they do. They you get stuck with poor design or buggy code. Even worse is that many of these areas have massive overlap. You can't design a good program unless you know how to program and debug. You can't program a good program unless you understand the design. etc etc.

I guess what I'm getting at the programming is a poster child of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts", by a huge amount. Each skill is a multiplier for all of the other skills. With so many overlapping skills, someone with all of the skills is suddenly magnitudes better than someone with slightly fewer skills.

I pay as much as you do, except I get a dedicated connection with sub 1ms pings, no cap, symmetrical, no-bundling required, non-intro price, no funny fees, bill hasn't changed in years, and I bet my jitter to nearly anywhere in the world is less than the ping you get to your first hop. You're getting ripped off.

It was a rhetorical question. I can blow through 150GB in a day, not even downloading. Someone on DSLReport is on Google Fiber and nearing 300TB/month. Don't ask, don't tell. Caps are stupid for most situations. Hell, I pay $90/m for a 100/100 dedicated uncapped connection will not have congestion, ISP does not oversubscribe. They don't even differentiate between business and residential because all residential customers have business quality Internet. All they sell is "Internet". You can purchase an SLA with all dedicated path-ways, that will cost you an arm and a leg, but if all you want is dedicated bandwidth and a connection that has 5 minutes of downtime every few months at 2am for regular maintenance, you can save yourself a lot of money.

How are you going to figure out an exciting new ways to integrate FB, Twitter, or Instagram if you don't even use it? Maybe some 18 y/o programmer will have the next great idea for his generation. What exciting new thing can you think of that the young generations will also think is fun and exciting? They don't just want programmers, they want people with ideas and inspiration. They want people who can get into the heads of the people they're targeting.

What they're getting after is can you relate to the demographic you're targeting. Anyone can develop a system, but it takes intuition to make a good system. In their case, a system that caters to the needs to "social internet" users.

Without hardware knowledge, you cannot have an expectation of how much performance you should get out of certain specs. This is why you get people who thinking throwing more servers at a problem is a perfectly good bandaid.

Supporting unencrypted is in itself a threat. It may not matter in all cases, but it matter enough that it's an overall win.