[sb8244]

Not to beat a dead horse, but is 10x about 9x or 11x? Or is it about "a magnitude more output than others" (10x)?

You don't necessarily need to quantify that exactly. If you've worked on a team with people like that, then you know it. Their managers know it too.

To your main point, the size of the markets is drastically different. There is only so much room for headline rockstars and entertainers, but there's way more room for talented technologists. Having "rockstars" in the engineering world doesn't really reduce the size of the pie for others.

[esafak]

If you can't measure it, it might as well be 2x or "just better".

If you can't prove your superior productivity, you are not going to get paid for it. Which is going to incentivize you to optimize for your company's promotion rubric instead, if you don't get fed up first. This leads to the lamented "promotion-driven design".

Or you can ditch the middle man and take your talents straight to the market, through consulting or incorporation.

[mgaunard]

You can definitely measure it. I've seen many times where people were struggling with problems for months with tons of operational incidents, before someone experienced came in and solved it for good in a couple of days.

[bee_rider]

That sounds like “just better.”

Or it could just be somebody that happened to have a crucial bit of domain knowledge.

Or the original composition of the team could have included some negative-contributors.

[mgaunard]

a team of people for months = 20 * 3 * 4

one guy for two days = 2

240/2 = 120

[bee_rider]

So even if we believe in the hypothetical general purpose 10x programmer, a 120x one seems a little implausible, right? I think it must be a domain expert or something was really dysfunctional about the original team.

[mgaunard]

In practice one very good guy can achieve as much as a whole badly managed organization.

It's not necessarily that he's that much better technically, but he's got the right drive, focus, and business acumen, and isn't bound by methodology or legacy.

The real problem with software development is that a lot of developers are too removed from the business to deliver something practical with value in the right places.