Agree 100%. Joel had a great essay on this back in the day called "Hitting the High Notes" [1] Perhaps a better way to look at this is to assume the average i

Agree 100%. Joel had a great essay on this back in the day called "Hitting the High Notes" [1] Perhaps a better way to look at this is to assume the average is 3X, and there exist developers at X, 10X, 0X, -X, and everywhere in between. And this productivity depends massively on circumstances like the size and makeup of the team, the established codebase, and the technical difficulty of the work. I've worked with several individuals that are absolutely a 10x for a technically-difficult project where they are leading the architecture, but range from -1X to 0X as a regular contributor to a large project. 1. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html