[rightbyte]

Add carpentry or vehicle technician to that list. All jobs where you have some sort of choice on how and what to do and motoric aptitude leads to high variance in skills.

The big difference is maybe that bad vehicle technicians are singled out by the boss or customers and quit? While neither the boss or customer can pinpoint a single programmer.

[tuesdayrain]

I think this boils down to literally any arbitrary skill based activity. Unless the output is heavily dependent on RNG, there will always be someone who is orders of magnitude better than the average person.