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I churn this out every so often: A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT bes

I churn this out every so often: A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance. The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work. Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

snovv_crash 5y ago
As much as I admire Peopleware, I think on this it misses the fact that there are "negative"-X programmers. Adding them to a team means the team gets _less_ work done, either through endless questions, dodging responsibility, demotivating others etc. In this kind of best/worst metric you end up with above-infinite-X programmers, because the worst you could give a working system to and they will break it. Once you filter out the worst, I've still seen 10x-vs-median programmers. They have some insight which collapses a buggy, never-complete 50kloc library into a 50 line function plus a call to a SAT solver, or have some deep understanding of the underlying system that lets the whole team avoid spinning its wheels on an impossible-to-diagnose bug. These people are worth 10 ticket-closers any day of the week.