Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

Both the author and Forbes have it backwards: there are developers out there that are ten times >worse< than the average developer. There are also, contrary to the articles assertion, plenty of teams that are 10 or a hundred or even infinitely worse than normal. (infinite meaning they never release anything at all, ever)

I guess that in any kind of game you have a system to sort out the worst players. Going after your theory, there are sure plenty of 1/100000 out there, but they never get in a major development project.

Another point: there are also superstar surgeons and lawyers. I think the author wanted to point that software development is not different from other professions.

Also his cost curve may be more accurate for a devops scenario than for classic product dev. Late changes/fixes induct lots of additional management cost to the technical issues, discussions with client etc. Not to say that you can't debug on a convenient environment but have sometime to reproduce it based on logs.

A small but important attribution note: the 'Developernomics' article was by Venkatesh Rao, author of the Ribbon Farm blog ("The Gervais Principle"). As Forbes notes:

"The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer."

It's possible, perhaps even likely, that another 'Forbes contributor' will write an article with a different opinion. So it's not 'Forbes' expressing an opinion that can be right or wrong; Forbes is just a conduit.

By traditional standards, if Forbes itself was expressing the publication's view (as typically determined by its chief editor, publisher, or an editorial board), the piece would either indicate that clearly or be completely unsigned.

As online publications open their sites to an ever-larger variety of contributors, to broaden their audience/archives/inlinks, this tradition of distinction about the actual author is as important as ever.

The evidence he cites—that there are no 10x companies—against there being 10x-median developers is weak. How would you even define the metrics to begin with? And assuming you came to a reasonable (and measurable!) definition, why would you assume that there would be companies made up entirely of super developers, and that they would retain their 10x advantage when working together even though for every other developer communication imposes overhead?

Other than that there are a lot of great points in the article, but in terms of actually proving or disproving the 10x-median theory, I think it's impossible. My gut tells me that 10x is definitely out there for the right master programmer with the right experience and ideas to apply to a specific project, but that you'll never see it across the board because programming is just too big and free-form for talent to outpace experience.

Certainly if HR people are out there basing their hiring strategy on finding 10x-ers, they are hopelessly clueless and deluded.

Reading this I can't help but think of Joel's classic piece, Hitting the high notes. He did go into some productivity statistics collected by a prof who had, in the course of his teaching, subjected many students to identical programming tasks. But what was far, far more compelling was this part:

"The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.

Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years."

And great work in software can be replicated essentially for free. That's why a great programmer can be worth so very much more to a business than an average one.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html