These things make my blood boil. I'm going to allow the assumption that 10x programmers even exist. First, it's elitist. This isn't a professional athletics te

These things make my blood boil. I'm going to allow the assumption that 10x programmers even exist. First, it's elitist. This isn't a professional athletics team, this is the workplace focused on engineering. Most places are not chock-full of the 10x'ers; I need to depend on other people to do things for me, and them on me; not all of us are 10x'ers, and it behooves all of us to work as a team. The 10x discussion distracts from that: a functioning team. Further, people seem to want to worship these "10x" programmers and forget about training anyone; we'll just hire 10x-ers only. Second, > Imagine traffic increases exponentially, and this average team setup an average website, with a data storage engine that’s hard to shard, hosting that doesn’t have enough redundancy, version control without proper backup, no CI environment, and no monitoring. This is exactly the output I imagine coming from a "10x" programmer: that person has been able to output at such a constant clip by writing code with enormous technical debt. I've had to work on these systems, and they're a PITA: how productive could I be if I didn't have to deal with the decisions of the guy who, judging by the codebase, was shoveling code out the door as quickly as possible? (i.e., what if a study held the programmer constant, and varied the environment? I bet I could be much more productive if I worked on a codebase that didn't fight me at every turn.) Last, the assumption; the article claims there are numerous studies on the matter … and cites none. What we get is a SE answer that contains a dead link to an article containing citations, which thankfully was quoted in the SE answer (but screw hyperlinking to anything). The first I can't find, the second's abstract doesn't seem to support the notion of 10x's ("Understanding and Controlling Software Costs"; the abstract indicates that it's about understanding software cost estimation[1]), the third is a book, not a study, the forth is a study wherein the participants are told to use different methods of implementing the solution (the research appears paywalled, so I can only see the abstract; and thus, doesn't apply), the next is too vague to tell as it "summarizes the results of […] investigations in the areas of design practices, coding techniques, test/verification methods, and computer utilization" and is paywalled, the next seems relevant but is paywalled, paywalled, paywalled, this is also a book ("Peopleware"), this is also a book ("Software Productivity"), this one is relevant and available[2], but it doesn't look like a very big sample?, and the last two I've lost motivation to find. [1]: https://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/2147/c6218db2e35d40f4a7bdb87ed47e3814ef4b.pdf https://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/2147/c6218db2e35d40f4a7... [2]: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/645438.pdf http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/645438.pdf