Lets say a great senior coder is twice as good as an average junior coder. The factor ten comes into play, when teams grow up, skills get diluted, and communica

Lets say a great senior coder is twice as good as an average junior coder. The factor ten comes into play, when teams grow up, skills get diluted, and communication overhead kills the project. Lets say the great senior was able to code 20 hours per week, and used the remaining time for email, a weekly blog, walk the dog and other recreations. He now has to lead a team of a few average coders, and as hiring hyped a lot of sub average people (1/4 of his own productivity), who are only working 8 hours effectively because the rest is wasted by powerpointless kickoff meetings, and recreational office coffee talk. imho, the factor 10 comes not from the coder, but from the system. There are some companies where its 10 times more fun to work, likely those attract those who are 10 times more productive. The software crisis for big projects is also a system crisis. Those projects start by big companies betting on a budget, without knowing whats really in the sack, and without knowing whom to choose to solve the problem from their pool of employees. Once one of them gets the projects, the middle management starts to fight each other. Trying to hire good coders from other projects, or trying to get bad people into the new budget. The resulting internal fluctuation will cause a mess on any project.