[adam_arthur]

The most prolific people at my startup were doing 20k/month. The worst performers were doing 500/month. No, the people doing 500/month didn't compensate for it in other ways.

Of course this was a company that needed to build a product and enhance it to survive, not a pseudo-monopoly daycare.

Even up to a few hundred developers, its quite obvious who's a strong contributor and who isn't. The people who produce the most code are almost uniformly also the most theoretically strong/capable. Though there was a case where somebody was quite prolific but produced pretty poor/buggy code. It's obvious from how smooth the features they developed go when shipped to production.

In most workplaces you'll find that 80% of the results are produced by the top 20% of contributors