[closeparen]

All I can say is, it’s been my subjective experience that competence and productivity are really variable. Some people at my company can produce beautiful, working, end to end solutions for complex problems in the time it takes others to grind out trivial maintenance tickets. Everyone knows who they are. Programmers are not basically all the same, and it’s worth thinking about the nature of the differences if you want to become one of those people, hire them, retain them, grow your team to be more like them, etc. To write them all off as myths, children, assholes, etc. is to reject the possibility of substantially improving at our craft. That’s a dangerous thing to do.

[zug_zug]

Agreed. I was formulating it as this (at a previous job, obviously)

There are 4 "top engineers." All 4 of these top engineers would identify each other as such.

There are 4 "D tier engineers." You'd rather have any ONE of the "top engineers" than ALL the "D tier" engineers.

These D-Tier engineers usually end up "managing" a rote manual process (e.g. calling a script sending emails in batches manually), when any "top tier" engineer would have written an automatic scripted solution that runs periodically, batches on an intelligent interval, logs its output, and automatically alarms if its results are anomalous (and done so in a week and moved on to a new project).

[james_s_tayler]

Agreed. I've known some very productive, very stable, very nice engineers. I've met the erratic kind too, but they're definitely not all that way.

[espeed]

10x programmers can hit a target no one else can see. This is true for 10x persons of all types in all endeavours, not just programmers. In this mode they are more artists than technicians. Compelled by vision from an overflowing sacred gift outpacing its faithful servant. Conventions and norms are not designed for this. Those who push beyond the bounds by definition cannot be bound by them. If you want to maximize their productivity, provide them with supporting infrastructure and surround them with brilliant editors to optimize this process and integrate their vision.