There is a common trope floating around which says that some developers are 10x more productive than others. This has led to a lot of questioning of whether or

There is a common trope floating around which says that some developers are 10x more productive than others. This has led to a lot of questioning of whether or not that is actually true in practice, what it means, whether it's possible to become a "10x" developer, and so on. The truth is that it's looking at the problem in the wrong way because it relies on the underlying assumption that development is like factory work, and somehow cranking out more code, or whatever measure you want for productivity, is more valuable. The truth is actually far more extreme. Some developers are orders of magnitude more productive than others. The work they do is simply that much better and more valuable. This should be unquestionably true as there are several examples of very, very small development teams (sub 5 person sized) who have churned out incredibly valuable products. You can chalk some of that up to luck, especially in the case of games, but not all of it. The fact is, building software well, building software that works, that does something valuable for users, that is free of major defects, that is designed in a way so that it can be maintained and extended easily, and so on, those things are not just about how many lines or function points a developer creates. But those things can add millions or even billions to the value of the end-product, and they can be done just by one person. Software is not factory work, nor is it strictly just engineering. The most important part of software development is a creative, artistic endeavor. And like all works of creativity the end result has an enormously wide variation in quality and value. If you're doing very "shallow" software development (e.g. pumping out CRUD apps or CMS backed sites or what-have-you) then years of experience may not do a whole lot for you. If you have the opportunity to take on meatier dev work then experience is more than just learning some tricks and being knowledgeable in the frameworks and toolsets of the day, it's about deep skills. About how build things well, and right. How to communicate effectively. How to write truly self-documenting code. How to wrangle the complexity of the problem space and the implementation space while mediating for the user in a way that makes sense to them. And so on. Some devs in some jobs just keep adding to their skilsets as time goes on.