Time is one of the dimensions, but I often see (bad) designers to stick with the first idea they have (and if they are not very good, the first idea is likely very bad), then as the idea shows the weaknesses, instead of understanding what is going on, they invent more broken "fixes" complicating even more the original idea. So there is a multiplicative effect of this going on and on. This is why the 10x programmer is not a myth: it would be if we were talking about "I can do 10 times what you do" and that would be impossible if you compare a top programmer with an average one. What happens is instead that a 10x programmer just avoids design mistakes one after the other, so they find themselves doing less and less useless work that in turn complicates things more and so forth. Being a 10x coder is about design, not coding.
It’s strange I started to observe some of this, but seems like the “bad designers” have no concept of design. They’re happy to have their code reviewed but won’t go over the design before starting to write code.
I still think you could have multiple levels of skill across design and code implementation though
i love opening up diagrams.net and working on designs. i think its possible one of my favourite things to do as a programmer. possibly more than actually coding.
