[carlmr]

I think the multipliers also conceal another issue. A lot of programmers have a net negative impact on your code base. They may be "productive" in the sense that they produce a lot of code, but then that code is riddled with bugs that drag down the whole team's velocity.

If you're 10x of a negative impact then you just produce bugs faster.

[kqr]

It doesn't take broken code to have a net negative impact. Any code at all is liability, so if you're writing code, it better be worth it. Figuring out what produces value is surprisingly hard, so I would bet the majority of code being written has a net negative impact.

And then don't get me started on marginal profit. Producing some value is a lot easier than producing marginal value that outweighs marginal costs. Now we're talking a smallish fraction of the code being written.