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I find the entire article quite poorly thought out and I disagree with it more or less entirely. One part in particular stood out as being perhaps the most off

I find the entire article quite poorly thought out and I disagree with it more or less entirely. One part in particular stood out as being perhaps the most offensive to reason: "Professional talent does vary, but there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, much less on a meaningful timescale such as that of a product release cycle." I really don't understand how anybody with experience in our industry could say such a thing. I would have thought it was fairly routine for "professional developers" (by which I assume he means those devs who work in companies) to meet large numbers of people who are completely incompetent. So in my view there must be a huge amount of first-hand evidence to support the statement that some people are 10x better than others (or even the more stringent requirement that they're 10x better than the median).

kd1221 15y ago
The problem with the 10x vs. 1x statement is that the 10x people are not constantly 10x better than the median. The environment in which they are placed has a lot to do with it. Circumstantial mediocrity is often a consequence of poor management, and the product release cycle is the petri dish of mediocrity. So a common problem arising from this situation is the choice between leaving a 10x-er on the line or promoting him to do other things. It's a trade-off. If you choose the former, you maintain increased productivity, but the exceptional developer will eventually get bored and leave; if you choose the latter, you end up watering down your production pool, and risk placing the developer in a role where he might not be a 10x-er. Constant [relative] mediocrity in a given developer pool is the stable state in either case.
technomancy 15y ago
I have no idea about the median developer, but the median job applicant is surely an order of magnitude worse than the top since the lower end spends much more time looking for work and the top devs never have to interview. So if you judge the industry by your experiences interviewing applicants it will be very bleak indeed.

kd1221 15y ago

The problem with the 10x vs. 1x statement is that the 10x people are not constantly 10x better than the median. The environment in which they are placed has a lot to do with it. Circumstantial mediocrity is often a consequence of poor management, and the product release cycle is the petri dish of mediocrity. So a common problem arising from this situation is the choice between leaving a 10x-er on the line or promoting him to do other things. It's a trade-off. If you choose the former, you maintain increased productivity, but the exceptional developer will eventually get bored and leave; if you choose the latter, you end up watering down your production pool, and risk placing the developer in a role where he might not be a 10x-er. Constant [relative] mediocrity in a given developer pool is the stable state in either case.

technomancy 15y ago

I have no idea about the median developer, but the median job applicant is surely an order of magnitude worse than the top since the lower end spends much more time looking for work and the top devs never have to interview. So if you judge the industry by your experiences interviewing applicants it will be very bleak indeed.