[eloff]

This isn't backed up by evidence or a sound argument, and comparing the capability of women to have babies with the productivity of programmers nicely sums up the intelligence of the argument.

Teams follow the 80/20 rule as well. 20% of the developers do 80% of the work (there is actually evidence in support of this, but I'm not going to look it up now)

Rockstar developers are a real thing. I work with some. I like to think I am one. I'm not talking about loud developers which the author seems to conflate with rockstar developers. I'm talking about the quiet thoughtful guys who have an amazing grasp of how everything fits together. They see the problem in amazing detail with all it's hairiness and then devise a simple, elegant solution for it.

Rockstar developers are the guys who solve the right problems. And there's an infinite gap between them and the bottom guys, because for some problems, the worst developers will never solve them. They tend to be around 10x as productive as above-average developers on the hardest problems. On easy problems there's a much smaller difference.

In my free time I work on a multi-threaded high-performance ACID relational database with concurrent algorithms, custom memory allocation and layout, hybrid index data structures and garbage collection algorithms. I don't know too many developers who can solve those kinds of problems, so I like to think I'm special. But all humans like to think that, so maybe I'm not actually a rockstar developer and I'm really just average-delusional. Who knows.