Because programming scales so well. Take a real world comparison say you have a person digging a ditch. If they work as hard and fast as they possibly can they might finish twice as fast. As a programmer if I find an n^2 algorithm and make it run in n, that code, for 1000 inputs runs 1000 times faster. The 10x idea exists not because we are smarter or work harder but because good code is so much better than bad code.
Because programming scales so well. Take a real world comparison say you have a person digging a ditch. If they work as hard and fast as they possibly can they might finish twice as fast. As a programmer if I find an n^2 algorithm and make it run in n, that code, for 1000 inputs runs 1000 times faster. The 10x idea exists not because we are smarter or work harder but because good code is so much better than bad code.
That makes sense... but the term still doesn't sit well with me. It sounds... too abstract. Totally get where you're coming from though :) Thanks!