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_ wor

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.