👋 Welcome to CTO Teachings’s blog. While we are a recruiting company, we happen to provide a free blog for people just like you. It’s packed with hard-won lessons from CTO—who’s helped managers rise to Engineering Director and CTO roles.
You’ve heard the legend.
That mythical dev who’s 20 times more productive than the average engineer.
Well, we’ve got news for you.
After conducting over 500 standardized interviews, we discovered that the 20x myth isn’t just true—it’s understated. The gap is worse than 20x.
Let’s break it down.
The Interview That Changed Everything
Over the years, we’ve worked with hundreds of engineers across many teams and projects. We eventually designed a real-world-style interview that could actually measure productivity—not just algorithms or trivia, but the kind of stuff you’d face on the job.
We capped it at an hour or two per candidate, simulating real work scenarios, and timed how long it took each developer to complete four straightforward tasks.Everyone received the same help at the same points in time, keeping it as fair and repeatable as possible.
Here’s where it gets wild:
- Top performers finished all four tasks in just 13 minutes.
- Others couldn’t even complete 25% in an hour.
- Some—despite already having dev jobs—were barely able to get started.
That’s not a 2x gap.
That’s not even 10x.
It’s a complete productivity chasm.
What Separated the Best from the Rest?
It wasn’t fancy CS algorithms or some rare language trick. The best devs didn’t sit there analyzing code for 10 minutes before doing anything. They just… started.
They learned by doing.
They’d hit an exception, fix it.
Next one, fix it.
Boom—done.
The slower candidates? They tried to “understand everything” first. They sat back, brows furrowed, paralyzed. And that’s the difference.
❝
Real-world work is messy.
The best developers engage with the mess.
Can You Train a 20x Developer?
Shockingly… yes.
When we tried this same interview again six months later at Orderly Health—after training the team—we saw major progress. Developers who once struggled were now solving problems in minutes.
One junior dev, with barely a year of experience, outperformed two seniors with 10+ years each. The seniors had assumed he was one of them for months—until a meeting revealed he was actually the most junior engineer on the team.
Turns out, some of your “junior” developers are already operating at a senior level—they just haven’t been recognized (or paid) like it.
The Key Behaviors of Top Engineers
Here’s what those standout devs consistently do:
- They debug immediately.
- They iterate fast.
- They don’t wait to fully understand—they build understanding as they go.
- They learn by doing, not watching.
If you want to build a team like that, try incorporating occasional pair programming cycles. We’ve seen teams become significantly faster when collaboration becomes normalized and hesitation to ask questions is reduced.
And Yes, Location Matters
This might ruffle feathers—but after running this interview across continents, here’s what we saw:
- In Ukraine and the U.S., about 1 in 20 candidates passed at a high level.
- In India, it took around 150 interviews to find a comparable developer.
We also saw attempts at gaming the system—particularly in offshore hiring. In one case, a candidate passed the interview, but once on the job, clearly couldn’t perform. We gave a similar test two weeks later—he bombed it. Someone else had clearly taken it for him.
So yes—be cautious with remote interviews, especially when hiring offshore. But there’s good news too.
Tools like ChatGPT are now helping talented offshore devs communicate better and work faster. That’s a huge win if you know how to identify and support top talent globally.
How to Design a 20x Developer Test
Want to try this yourself? Here’s how:
- Build a simple business-style coding task—think: 4 JUnit or TypeScript tests that hit an API.
- Set a time limit—no more than 60–90 minutes.
- Only offer help at predefined times, equally for all candidates.
- Translate the test into multiple languages: Python, TypeScript, C#, etc.
That last point is crucial.
Many companies only interview in the language they’re comfortable with. But the best devs can switch stacks easily—especially with modern AI tools. If you're only testing in Python, you might be missing your best TypeScript dev.
And remember: the average dev tries to understand code.
The 20x dev changes it.
Final Thought
We stopped giving “hard” interviews a long time ago. Now we just watch who solves real problems—fast.
Try it yourself. Build a speed-based, real-world coding test. You’ll never look at interviews the same way again.
Need help finding 20x developers—onshore or offshore?
That’s what we do.
If you are ever looking for a job or expanding your team, connect with Shelly, Yuliia, or Harold on LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading,
CTO Teachings