> How do you measure "X", anyway? By hiring. Or, rather, not hiring. At every single company I worked for we had huge trouble finding new people skilled enoug

> How do you measure "X", anyway? By hiring. Or, rather, not hiring. At every single company I worked for we had huge trouble finding new people skilled enough to understand our product/codebase and extend it. A task that took a new hire two weeks to do sloppily would take any of our engineers about two hours to do properly. Recently we had one guy build nine prototypes of a test jig over the span of two months and none of them worked reliably. I ended up drafting my version one evening out of boredom (it wasn't even my responsibility) and not only it worked - it ended up being the favorite of our test team. Needless to say, we had to lay off that engineer. He simply wasn't producing the value we paid for him. I'm not saying there are 10x programmers. Maybe there's just 1x and 0.1x. Maybe it's 3.33x and 0.33x. But the discrepancy is there, and it's disheartening.