Actually, in the case of Gretzky and Lemieux, I believe they did average ~10x more points (and other contributions) per season than the average player. Also, do

Actually, in the case of Gretzky and Lemieux, I believe they did average ~10x more points (and other contributions) per season than the average player. Also, don't forget that the NHL is just the best of the best; there are many hockey players that are "pros" but never make it to the NHL. When you factor them in, players like Gretzky may be several orders of magnitude better than average. >> it blows my mind to think there's a large number of people out there who in just a few hours could knock out everything I spent all of last week on. First of all, as I wrote in the post, 10x programmers are rare. There isn't a "large number" of them. Second, it's not about producing more lines of code per minute or per week. It's about producing the maximum value (for lack of a better word) in a time period by making good decisions. I'm not a 10x programmer and the results on my own work week are pretty obvious: when I look at it closely, I realize that I spend a lot of time dealing previous mistakes. I lose days because I made a solution that's too tightly coupled and it's hard to adapt the code to a new situation; I didn't add enough tests and waste lots of time fixing regressions; I didn't add enough documentation and can't remember why I made certain decisions; I've created designs that don't scale and need to be replaced entirely; and so on. Since it's harder to read code than to write it[1] and since the cost of fixing defects increases dramatically later in the software process[2], these bad decisions eat up an enormous amount of time. However, as I learn more, I've noticed that I spend a much higher proportion of my time solving the "real" business problem instead of dealing with previous mistakes. In other words, I'm becoming dramatically more productive than I used to be, not because I'm typing faster, but because I'm avoiding/reducing entire branches of work that used to eat up my time. These sorts of effects multiply: for the 10x programmer, the gain in productivity can be huge and they will be able to get an order of magnitude more done than the average coder. * [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html * [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing#Economics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing#Economics