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In the interests of context and actual references regarding the 10x thing, I have canned response that I churn out: The 10x programmers thing; from a 2nd edit

In the interests of context and actual references regarding the 10x thing, I have canned response that I churn out: The 10x programmers thing; from a 2nd edition of Peopleware, the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it’s comparing your best to your worst – NOT best to median (it’s also not about programming specifically; it’s simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance). The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on your best outperforming your median by a factor of 2.5 (this of course indicates that if you are that median developer, middle of the pack, you’re already a 4x developer under this numbering scheme). Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you’ve got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we’re all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work. Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ “Peopleware”, DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

droithomme 11y ago
> it’s comparing your best to your worst To be clear, DeMarco found clustering, so it's not your best to your worst, where you refers to a given organization. The gap appears only when looking interorganizationally. In the measured comparable tests they did one company had a lot of highly effective programmers, another company had a lot of ineffective programmers, and it wasn't common to find mixtures of both kinds at any given company. So at a given company it will appear that everyone is similarly productive, and the people there may tend to believe 10:1 is a myth. The 10:1 is only apparent when comparing people interorganizationally. Also, of course the productivity was not in terms of LOC per hour, but was in terms of several elements regarding solving a given problem correctly. In general the highest productivity people solved that given problem in 10x less time using 10x fewer LOC and 10x fewer bugs than the lowest productivity people who used more LOC to accomplish the same thing, introducing more bugs in the process, and taking more time to do so.

droithomme 11y ago

> it’s comparing your best to your worst To be clear, DeMarco found clustering, so it's not your best to your worst, where you refers to a given organization. The gap appears only when looking interorganizationally. In the measured comparable tests they did one company had a lot of highly effective programmers, another company had a lot of ineffective programmers, and it wasn't common to find mixtures of both kinds at any given company. So at a given company it will appear that everyone is similarly productive, and the people there may tend to believe 10:1 is a myth. The 10:1 is only apparent when comparing people interorganizationally. Also, of course the productivity was not in terms of LOC per hour, but was in terms of several elements regarding solving a given problem correctly. In general the highest productivity people solved that given problem in 10x less time using 10x fewer LOC and 10x fewer bugs than the lowest productivity people who used more LOC to accomplish the same thing, introducing more bugs in the process, and taking more time to do so.