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> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doub

> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.

DarkShikari 17y ago
Always remember the classic story about "where to put the X"... Have you ever heard of Charlie Steinmetz? Legend has it that he was a prominent electrical engineer in the early twentieth century. Not long after his retirement, all of the engineers at General Electric had a problem. Although each was wise, they were unable to understand the complexity of the machinery. A call was made and Charlie Steinmetz came to the plant to offer his assistance. Ol’ Charlie walked around the machine for a few minutes, just looking it over, not touching anything. After a few minutes, Charlie took out a piece of chalk, walked over and placed a large X on one particular part of the machine. When the other engineers disassembled the machine, they were amazed to find that it was exactly where the problem was. A few days later, the engineers received an invoice from Charlie for $10,000! This was a lot of money in those days, so they returned it to Charlie and ask that he itemize it. A few days later, they received an itemized bill which read: Making one X mark – $1.00 Knowing where to place the X – $9999.00 Even if one tosses the idea that there are "rockstar programmers" who are 10x more productive than merely good ones, someone with the right experience and domain knowledge can be priceless. I have certainly found cases in which I could merely hear the symptoms of a very subtle bug and find it in 2 minutes, whereas a great programmer unfamiliar with the codebase, field, and my past experience might have taken a week to find it.
- btilly 17y ago
  There are so many variations of that story floating around that someone may have heard it, but not recognize any detail of the version you gave. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 cites several other variations for comparison.
- gruseom 17y ago
  It's a legend that's often told about Tesla as well: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp There's a really similar story about Picasso asked by a lady in a restaurant to draw a simple sketch on a napkin. He does and hands it to her saying, "That will be [X] thousand dollars". Shocked, she says: "But that only took you 30 seconds!" "Madam", says Picasso, "It took me thirty years."
btilly 17y ago
Never meaningfully demonstrated? Have you tried to verify the claim? Go read Peopleware. You will find described very carefully set up coding comparisons that routinely found a factor of 10 productivity difference between different experienced programmers on the same task, and also a discussion of what organizational factors lead to those productivity differences. There is other research on the topic as well. For instance http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Forgotten+Facts+About+Software+Engineering&utm_content=andrew%40badera.us&utm_campaign=BYC-Issue+38-December+3 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm... cites "individual differences" research that found a 30 fold difference between mediocre programmers and the top programmers. That article is supposed to be a distillation of http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-Robert/dp/0321117425 http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-R... so I'd look there if you want citations into how that research was done and what exactly they found.
- kingkongreveng_ 17y ago
  Well, I just googled the peopleware citation and it seems the study backing this often repeated claim is from the 1960s and people have plenty of questions about its methodology. I'll easily buy 2X or 3X productivity difference. I'm not buying these casually tossed off claims about 10X or 30X productivity differences without the supporting research discussed in detail front and center. Unacknowledged differences of that magnitude would imply a massive arbitrage opportunity that has persisted for many years. And that's just not realistic.
  - btilly 17y ago
    I don't know what you found through Google, but it was a bad description of the research cited in Peopleware. For a start the research they discuss was done in the 1980s, not the 1960s, and the methodology of their study was quite carefully done. Read http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_8 http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_8 for a much better overview of what Peopleware actually says. Of more interest than the productivity differences measured is the discussion of what factors were part of those productivity differences. Once you've read that, you may find the result much more believable. (There is a lot of detail in the book that is left out of the summary, but that's in the nature of what summaries are.)
icey 17y ago
I think that part of the problem is unqualified programmers are part of the equation. The amount of "developers" out there who have no idea what they're doing is shocking. The dot-com implosion helped cut some of the excess weight, but there are still a lot of people working in software who have no excuse being there.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
nikolayav 17y ago
It clicks with my intuition. In one particular area of programming, competitive programming, productivity is easier to measure. One might call Tomek Czaijka the Federer of algorithmic competitions. As of 1.5 yrs ago, he had made more than $130k off of TopCoder competitions [1]. Seeing as how he is still ranked 3rd, this figure might be outdated [2]. I can assure you the average TopCoder contestant who has competed over a comparable amount of time made way less than $130k/30 ~ $4300. Easily more than 30 times the productivity. You can argue about how coding up toy programs compares to working on products. I suspect there is a strong correlation though. As a point of reference, please consider Steve Newman, who co-wrote Writely which was subsequently acquired by Google and is today the word processor of Google Docs [3]. He must have made some money in the process and was also successful at topcoder.com [4]. That being said, I do knew similar people with astonishingly low "product" productivity. 1. http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/07/06/Top-Coder-Tomek-Czajka/ http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/07/06/... 2. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=144400 http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=14440... 3. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/262443_googlewritely10.html http://www.seattlepi.com/business/262443_googlewritely10.htm... 4. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=SimpleStats&c=coder_achievements&d1=statistics&d2=coderAchievements&cr=7445961 http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=SimpleStats&c=coder_ac...

DarkShikari 17y ago

Always remember the classic story about "where to put the X"... Have you ever heard of Charlie Steinmetz? Legend has it that he was a prominent electrical engineer in the early twentieth century. Not long after his retirement, all of the engineers at General Electric had a problem. Although each was wise, they were unable to understand the complexity of the machinery. A call was made and Charlie Steinmetz came to the plant to offer his assistance. Ol’ Charlie walked around the machine for a few minutes, just looking it over, not touching anything. After a few minutes, Charlie took out a piece of chalk, walked over and placed a large X on one particular part of the machine. When the other engineers disassembled the machine, they were amazed to find that it was exactly where the problem was. A few days later, the engineers received an invoice from Charlie for $10,000! This was a lot of money in those days, so they returned it to Charlie and ask that he itemize it. A few days later, they received an itemized bill which read: Making one X mark – $1.00 Knowing where to place the X – $9999.00 Even if one tosses the idea that there are "rockstar programmers" who are 10x more productive than merely good ones, someone with the right experience and domain knowledge can be priceless. I have certainly found cases in which I could merely hear the symptoms of a very subtle bug and find it in 2 minutes, whereas a great programmer unfamiliar with the codebase, field, and my past experience might have taken a week to find it.

btilly 17y ago
There are so many variations of that story floating around that someone may have heard it, but not recognize any detail of the version you gave. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 cites several other variations for comparison.
gruseom 17y ago
It's a legend that's often told about Tesla as well: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp There's a really similar story about Picasso asked by a lady in a restaurant to draw a simple sketch on a napkin. He does and hands it to her saying, "That will be [X] thousand dollars". Shocked, she says: "But that only took you 30 seconds!" "Madam", says Picasso, "It took me thirty years."

btilly 17y ago

Never meaningfully demonstrated? Have you tried to verify the claim? Go read Peopleware. You will find described very carefully set up coding comparisons that routinely found a factor of 10 productivity difference between different experienced programmers on the same task, and also a discussion of what organizational factors lead to those productivity differences. There is other research on the topic as well. For instance http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Forgotten+Facts+About+Software+Engineering&utm_content=andrew%40badera.us&utm_campaign=BYC-Issue+38-December+3 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm... cites "individual differences" research that found a 30 fold difference between mediocre programmers and the top programmers. That article is supposed to be a distillation of http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-Robert/dp/0321117425 http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-R... so I'd look there if you want citations into how that research was done and what exactly they found.

kingkongreveng_ 17y ago
Well, I just googled the peopleware citation and it seems the study backing this often repeated claim is from the 1960s and people have plenty of questions about its methodology. I'll easily buy 2X or 3X productivity difference. I'm not buying these casually tossed off claims about 10X or 30X productivity differences without the supporting research discussed in detail front and center. Unacknowledged differences of that magnitude would imply a massive arbitrage opportunity that has persisted for many years. And that's just not realistic.
- btilly 17y ago
  I don't know what you found through Google, but it was a bad description of the research cited in Peopleware. For a start the research they discuss was done in the 1980s, not the 1960s, and the methodology of their study was quite carefully done. Read http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_8 http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_8 for a much better overview of what Peopleware actually says. Of more interest than the productivity differences measured is the discussion of what factors were part of those productivity differences. Once you've read that, you may find the result much more believable. (There is a lot of detail in the book that is left out of the summary, but that's in the nature of what summaries are.)

icey 17y ago

I think that part of the problem is unqualified programmers are part of the equation. The amount of "developers" out there who have no idea what they're doing is shocking. The dot-com implosion helped cut some of the excess weight, but there are still a lot of people working in software who have no excuse being there.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

nikolayav 17y ago

It clicks with my intuition. In one particular area of programming, competitive programming, productivity is easier to measure. One might call Tomek Czaijka the Federer of algorithmic competitions. As of 1.5 yrs ago, he had made more than $130k off of TopCoder competitions [1]. Seeing as how he is still ranked 3rd, this figure might be outdated [2]. I can assure you the average TopCoder contestant who has competed over a comparable amount of time made way less than $130k/30 ~ $4300. Easily more than 30 times the productivity. You can argue about how coding up toy programs compares to working on products. I suspect there is a strong correlation though. As a point of reference, please consider Steve Newman, who co-wrote Writely which was subsequently acquired by Google and is today the word processor of Google Docs [3]. He must have made some money in the process and was also successful at topcoder.com [4]. That being said, I do knew similar people with astonishingly low "product" productivity. 1. http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/07/06/Top-Coder-Tomek-Czajka/ http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/07/06/... 2. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=144400 http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=14440... 3. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/262443_googlewritely10.html http://www.seattlepi.com/business/262443_googlewritely10.htm... 4. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=SimpleStats&c=coder_achievements&d1=statistics&d2=coderAchievements&cr=7445961 http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=SimpleStats&c=coder_ac...