I am not sure what you are getting at. Are you counting productivity by LOC? To sum-up: - This is not her only project, just the main project - She has taken

I am not sure what you are getting at. Are you counting productivity by LOC? To sum-up: - This is not her only project, just the main project - She has taken grad courses, doing a grad course in MIT will easily be more work than average developer do in whole year. - She had to study several research areas before choosing her main project. It is unlike I read the tutorial of currently trending distributed system Apache Spark and now I know everything about state of the art research. It is going through dozens of research papers in that domain, understanding all the concepts, identifying the gap in existing research, figuring out how to fill that gap. - You will fail several times before finding a good approach. The author have mentioned she had tried with Scala first, later switched to Python. - Even the results are good, you have to write the paper which is not trivial, and getting it accepted before getting rejected several times. - Worst case scenarios are also likely. Mid-way in the project you have found out someone else has recently published a paper. Now your work is worth-less because it is already published. Or you have found it there is an obscure paper that also outlined the approach you have taken, now you have lost the novelty factor of your paper. TL;DR: 200 lines of some UI JS code is not same as 200 lines of new deep learning algorithm in TensorFlow.