I worked at a start-up dot-com. A programmer on my team was given a task, and a research paper with an algorithm that she could implement. We waited. It beca

I worked at a start-up dot-com. A programmer on my team was given a task, and a research paper with an algorithm that she could implement. We waited. It became critical to the company, and I decided to look at the paper to see how bad it was. In a matter of hours, I had a working solution. I told my boss, and we agreed to use my code in secret, while my co-worker finished her task. It took her a month of uninterrupted work... to give up. OF COURSE there are 10x differences between programmers. I feel like I'm relatively at the top of my game, and I know people who code circles around me. One of them has eidetic memory, and is also a genius to boot. He reads a manual to learn a new programming language. He's literally fluent in a programming language, and uses the correct idioms, in a matter of hours. Meanwhile, I'm copy-paste-modifying, doing everything like I would have in C++, for days or weeks. An 18-year-old won Google Code Jam on his first try. I rest my frickin case. Does there exist a programmer who is 10x as productive as another programmer, at a given task, given they both have the same amount of experience? OF COURSE ones like that EXIST. If you want to talk about how common they are, how wide the spread really is, and underlying reasons, then yes, that warrants research. But you don't need STATISTICS to prove something EXISTS. Anecdotal evidence is perfectly valid to prove something EXISTS.