[jakejake]

I only have my own antidotal experience as a consultant with probably less than 100 companies. But I would say that it's impossible to quantify programmer productivity so specifically as 10x or 1000x. It's a lot more complicated than that. One person may be a monster at fixing bugs. Another is incredibly gifted at designing object models. One person is great at the visual design. It's further complicated by the fact that 10 great lines of code may be more "productive" that 100 lines of garbage.

That being said, I do believe the spirit of these kind of statements to be accurate. Some programmers seem to be constantly inspired, always surprising you with a solid, clean and simple solution. Others seem to get bogged down in complexity and create fragile solutions with bugs that continue to pop up for years. The latter needs to be nudged in the right direction regularly. If left to design anything that is too big on their own without guidance they can and will cause disasters.

If you have ever had to manage programmers, you know that there are one or two guys who you give the really complicated problems - and then you don't have to stress because you know it will be perfect - even better than perfect. The other group you have to be more selective with their tasks and plan to check in more frequently. I spend a fair amount of my time trying to figure out why one struggles so much and the other does not - and how to help the one who struggles to become better. I don't consider myself a master, but I am one of those people for whom it seems to come easily. I'm not sure if it's experience or just a certain type of mind? I just know that I've observed it many times at many different companies.