Depends on how you define average. I work on a software team that's about twice as productive as any other team our size that I've previously encountered, regar

Depends on how you define average. I work on a software team that's about twice as productive as any other team our size that I've previously encountered, regardless of skill. But the technical abilities of everyone on the team (with one possible exception out of ten) fall well within the fat part of the Gaussian distribution. We're all "average" technically. But I wouldn't call anyone here "average". We excel as a team because everyone's "soft" skills are well above average. Self management, in particular. But also pride in one's work. Ability to collaborate effectively. Willingness to learn from one another. Lack of ego. Interest in solving business problems rather than "sexy" technical problems. Empathy. We're building what's 95% a CRUD app anyway, though with some additional complexity to handle scale. Engineers with top 10% technical skills would be bored out of their skulls here. But if we hired "average" engineers without those exceptional "soft" skills we'd be accomplishing less than half as much as we do now.