[partyboat1586]

This is good to know. I always thought it meant 10x average which seemed absurd. I can certainly attest to having worked on teams where there are one or two developers 10x better than the worst developers on the team. Tbh I think the worst developers are actually negative value because they take so much time from other developers.

[qznc]

One source for the 10x number is the book Peopleware. They did Coding War Games where developer got an exercise. The 10x is the time it took them to code an application which fulfills the requirements. The best is 2.5x compared to average.

Since it is a single person task, they cannot impact anyone negatively.

However, the most interesting fact in my opinion is that within the same organization the difference is only 0.3x. Either the organizational environment determines your productivity or the organization determines which kind of developers get there. The experiment does not tell us anything how the productivity of a developer changes when he changes organizations.

[kqr]

"A bad system will beat a good person every time" as Deming said.