"Clearly, there are factors that don't have to do with political skill at work here, and those factors have effects that can completely swamp the effects of pol

"Clearly, there are factors that don't have to do with political skill at work here, and those factors have effects that can completely swamp the effects of political skill." Too much supply can certainly swamp the effects of political skills. So does the fact that the best McDonalds workers are only 1.2-1.5x as good as the average worker. So does the fact that McDonalds are rarely limited by number of staff; it scales well. In the software world though we have a very different landscape. There is strong demand. The good are 5x better than the average, who are 5x better than the worst. And scaling a software team is incredibly inefficient due to communication overheads such that even if the average programmer was 5x cheaper the outputs of a team of 30 average programmers can be less than the output of 5 3x programmers.