He debunks McConnell's claims, which are specifically about 10x research, not the 10x claim itself. But I'll happily go down that road. The 10x claim ("the mos

He debunks McConnell's claims, which are specifically about 10x research, not the 10x claim itself. But I'll happily go down that road. The 10x claim ("the most productive engineers are 10x more productive than the least productive") is ridiculous on its face; the least productive are zero or negatively productive. There are people who can't program at all, and there are people who actively detrimental. Therefore, two things are clear: 1. The correct statement is "the most productive engineers are infinitely more productive than the least productive." 2. This is useless information. A more useful statement would be "the most productive engineers are x% more productive than the median." Or even a histogram—that would be super useful! But, it turns out, there is no way to measure real-world engineer productivity, so any quantitative claims are, in fact, utter bullshit. And, if you look at the original research that McConnell cites, that turns out to be true. IIRC, the study was comparing the how long it took to debug programs when using a time-share system vs. a batch-processing system. (To be clear: I'm arguing about the claim, not the variations in productivity. Obviously, people have variations in productivity. But there is no rigorous evidence for the magnitude or nature of those variations.)