The Grant Sackman experiment, often quoted, rarely reproduced.
To «prove» a 10x programmer existence you would need a bi-modal repartition on the percentile of workers/speed.
The grant sackman/peopleware/The Mythical Man Month all try to answer a question that is tricky : what makes someone creative productive?
People focus on the speed. But they are just forgetting the most important part of the experiment.
One of the most important part of G/S experiment that everybody forget is the lack of correlation between performance and
1) diploma
2) experience after 2 years of practice.
Having done more than one job, other fields of works that are also creativity based, the «feeling» was that it is not only about coders but musicians, intellectual professions, journalists, project manager...
What are the implication of the lack of relation between diploma and experience?
1) Diploma are overpriced, the job market is artificially skewed in favor of those who have the money for it;
2) New devs are underpaid, old devs overpaid.
The burden of the proof that a diploma/experience is relevant for a job should be in the hand of the one selling diploma. Diploma especially in computer science seems to be a SCAM
The effect of this scam is :
1) young workers enslaved by loans in jobs they may not be good at/liking;
2) a rigid job market that prevent people from moving hence artificially creating difficulties to have full employment
3) an artificial exacerbated competition resulting in cheating from both sides.