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I hear this statement all the time. Great developers are 20x more productive than average developers. I've been a software engineering manager for 20+ years.

I hear this statement all the time. Great developers are 20x more productive than average developers. I've been a software engineering manager for 20+ years. I've worked with great teams and I've worked with teams where it fell on me to fix a bug because no one else could figure it out. In my experience, it's more complicated than good developers vs. average developers. There are best practices that great developers demonstrate. There are great developers who are terrible team players and there are terrible developers who turn out to be great product managers. There are average developers who have a critical ability to keep the team together and to get even more out of the top developers. In my experience, I prefer the right attitude, the right drive, and a person who is constantly striving to do better. There's a lot of arrogance in our industry. I'm not sure it's something that we should continue to embrace.

iamumassthrower 14y ago
> In my experience, I prefer the right attitude, the right drive, and a person who is constantly striving to do better. Agreed, these are all attributes that help make the job of managing corporate developers much easier. As opposed to those stubborn, arrogant, stud developers who are only useful for doing things like rewriting the unix kernel and open-sourcing it.
benlakey 14y ago
I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I think the points are complimentary. I also wrote a post prior to this one, in which I argue that a team of good developers that can work together is far better than a team with one technically superior developer who can't work with others. If you can find the developer who is both technically great, and can communicate effectively in a team, you've found a very special person indeed.