> However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. Quantitatively? Not my area, but you could boil it down to s

> However I do not know if there is a easy way (a "litmus paper") that could say she is 5x better. Quantitatively? Not my area, but you could boil it down to something as simple as "number of features shipped in a quarter." However, I think the real value comes in when you're talking about non quantitative analysis of these coders. What awesome, innovative products has Yahoo! shipped in the last year?[1] What are they doing to make Yahoo! Mail better than GMail, or to make people stop laughing if you give them an @yahoo.com address? No, registering ymail.com does not count for much. A single, highly productive programmer that's shipping useful features, inspiring ingenuity within the team, giving back to open source communities and, at a high enough level, giving interesting tech talks at conferences/hackerspaces/etc, can easily be as useful to the company as five average coders. Maybe not 5x as productive, depending on measurement, but definitely that much more useful. Rock stars, when they aren't full of themselves or throwing that term around like little kids, really can make giant differences. Think about it - would you trade five of your company's management team for Paul Graham? I sure as hell would. [1] Okay, Hadoop is pretty cool, but even that is based off of Google research.