[TeeMassive]

In a company I've worked for, the "bests" were given the projects with mostly clean slates, and were rewarded for coding quickly, meanwhile the other developers struggled to integrate everything together and refactors were often frowned upon "to not waste time on the delivery of the project". And of course only "the bests" were authorized to work on those new clean slates projects. This gave rise to a very nasty positive feedback cycle where none of the original devs remained at the end of the project.

But it is true that the actual bests are 5 to 50 times more productive. I've seen it mainly with specialized consultants. Need to fix your tool chain? You can be sure that the build master consultant will be worth every pennies to fix those obscure C++ linking errors. Need to patch the kernel and even send the patch to Linus? Again, I wouldn't be surprised if you get a 100x ratio compared to a mid seniority dev who never did that.

From my experiences, the high productivity ratio between low end devs and high end devs stem from the multiple multiplicative factors that goes into making programming more efficient. Knowing how to automate repetitive work with scripts, typing fast and having a good knowledge of the appropriate tools and frameworks will help each other exponentially.

[knowtheworld]

Programming itself is a super lever. That's probably why the productivity among software engineers can be so extreme.