even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that) That's not very hard to imagine, at all. Take a

even if there are 3 orders of magnitude differences in productivity among different people (and I doubt that) That's not very hard to imagine, at all. Take a guy who flunked out of 8th grade due to his inability to read. Point him at a computer. Ask him to fix a problem in a Ruby on Rails application which you've benchmarked an intermediate engineer at requiring 1 day. If the problem is solved within 1,000 days, he's within 3 orders magnitude of that engineer's productivity.