I came in on a project where an outsourced team of two had spent 6 months developing this little app. It was a mess, took over s minute to load, shipped half if

I came in on a project where an outsourced team of two had spent 6 months developing this little app. It was a mess, took over s minute to load, shipped half if Windows as dependencies, and didn't really work. In one week, I had a more functional version working, and with less than a month of further work, we had a finished product. So, that's a 50x difference, at s minimum. Same on a small scale. Little feature needed adding to a tiny codebase (no hidden enterprise or framework stuff). One guy said he could do it in an hour or two, I took under 3 minutes. Sure, maybe he just failed to see the obvious, easy, FP, way and planned to build some huge OO system. Still, the overall result remains. I dunno if these other people were average. But I am shocked at the lower levels of competency available and actively working and billing people. Edit: And I know I'm nowhere near top coder level. I've a limited understanding of many things. So much stuff I read of other people's work impresses my greatly and leaves me knowing I'll never be top level. I don't have a one-in-a-thousand IQ. I find it very plausible there are people 10x me, and I'm probably above average.