The Fred Brooks insight about 10x was that the best programmers were 10x as productive as the worst programmers, not the average programmer.
I guess this leaves open question about the distribution of productivity across programmers and the difference between the min and the mean. Is productivity normally distributed? Log normal? Some kind of power law?
The worst programmers i have worked with have negative productivity in that they leave a mess of work for everyone else, so 10x programmers must be the reason any of us are employed!
I guess this leaves open question about the distribution of productivity across programmers and the difference between the min and the mean. Is productivity normally distributed? Log normal? Some kind of power law?