Generalizations, not true. In my experience many of the most talented and valuable programmers work on important legacy systems. There is a class of programmers

Generalizations, not true. In my experience many of the most talented and valuable programmers work on important legacy systems. There is a class of programmers who only want to work on green fields projects, and they may think they are 10X or ninjas or rockstars. They aren't. That's arrogance, not skill or expertise or ability to deliver. I have 40 years programming experience to back that up. I agree that measuring individual programming productivity, or making any general statements about it, can be so hard that it's almost meaningless to say anything. Someone can be wildly good on project A with team X, and then flail on project B with yeam Y. I wrote about this: http://typicalprogrammer.com/why-dont-software-development-methodologies-work http://typicalprogrammer.com/why-dont-software-development-m...