3 ms·
It seems that there would be a huge selection bias in this study. They only looked at programmers taking their course. But wouldn’t the best programmers be much
by zeroonetwothree 7y ago
It seems that there would be a huge selection bias in this study. They only looked at programmers taking their course. But wouldn’t the best programmers be much less likely to take a course for improving their skills? So it’s no wonder they found that only a tiny % were very good. We can’t really conclude anything about the population at large from this.
- jvanderbot 7y agoThey found no true outliers in this group, but were able to make comparisons which did seem to show fantastic 10x (or 24x) outperformances. From this you may conclude that comparing programmers is difficult and likely to produce misleading metrics. They found that 95% of programmers had such high variance in their day-to-day that Bob on Monday might be >10x with respect to Bob on Tuesday. And, this variance dwarfed the variance between Bob and Alice, one of whom may be a supposed 10x programmer.
- watwut 7y agoThrough this particular thing may be due to them being students. They tend to code overnight and then be clearly sleep deprived - but still insist on coding and being unaffected. So you get high performance one day and horrible one after. Imo, once your lifecycle becomes more regular, a lot of these ups and downs disappear.