[crazygringo]

I don't think that's the right way to look at it.

If we go by simple math, developers who are 25x better/faster can launch a new product in 2 weeks instead of a year. That can make the difference between owning an entire market and not even being a participant.

Or you can take a team of 75 developers and instead use only 3. The overhead and cost and difficulty of coordination and communcation between 75 developers can just be too much for a project to succeed, but with only 3 amazing developers it becomes easy.

Also, software projects tend to reach points where they become overly complex or unmaintainable. Developers who are 25x better prevent that from happening, keeping everything working smoothly.

So it's not about bringing 25x revenue. It's about bringing revenue period, or maintaining competitiveness to continue that revenue.

[pudakai]

"Also, software projects tend to reach points where they become overly complex or unmaintainable. Developers who are 25x better prevent that from happening, keeping everything working smoothly."

Actually, I think this is the heart of the issue in the productivity debate - I view my biggest challenge as writing code/architecture that can be maintained, easily debugged, etc, my devs (or future devs) are as a constituency for my software as well as my users.

But this is, in a big org, extremely hard to monetize, as disasters/chronic bleed avoided are not even entered into the balance sheet.