It really can be. The least productive people are not only producing less work in more time, they are also producing work that needs to be reviewed more thoroug

It really can be. The least productive people are not only producing less work in more time, they are also producing work that needs to be reviewed more thoroughly, needs to be redone, or causes bugs whose fixes take more time than the original implementation took. Add all these up and you can easily exceed 10x productivity compared to a developer who gets it right the first time, producing code that's clean, easy to maintain, and easy to adapt to changing requirements. Not only have I seen it first hand, I've seen it over and over, and I expect to continue to see it throughout my career.