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by growingconcern 5326 days ago
If he can't say that it's easy to measure whether someone is 10x more productive than the average programmer then how can he say they are 10x more effective? Also I work at 200 person game company and there is no programmer that even performs close to that level. Maybe 2 to 3x the average for absolutely exceptional programmers. But your average would have to be pretty fucking crappy to get anything more than that (and even very talented programmers aren't more than 2x the average).
1 comments

Productivity in the shortest time scales is hard to measure.

But, when someone spends a few days and makes an optimization that literally prevents well over 1 million dollars of new hardware from being purchased that's real value. (This actually happened.) Create that type of value a few times in 5 years and yes someone can really create 10x the value of the average programmer.

PS: Not a programming example but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction is one of the more extreme examples. Kary Mullis literally created billions of dollars of value paying him 10x what the average researcher makes for 40 years and it's still a net win.