Super-star programmers

To quote The Spolsk himself: "This paper is the ultimate rebuttal to those grumpy people who email me, barely able to conceal their disgust, saying, 'why do you need to hire such smart people to work on bug tracking software?'"

Most developers suck at programming (and that's actually OK). 90% of the code they write is copy and pasted from elsewhere in the codebase or from the web, and then tweaked until it does something approximately correct. They usually need help when solving a new pattern of problem. What they do often have is domain knowledge not related to programming, and produce just about acceptable results out of the machine in a labour-intensive way that doesn't really scale over time or problem size, but they muddle through with determination.

I don't know about a 10x productivity differences though. I'm not really arguing in favour of that hypothesis. Rather, if anything, I've seen step differences in potential; that is, there are developers that can do things other developers can never do, not in 10x the time, not in 1000x the time.

They found 10x differences in time spent on the average coding war (which was typically a pretty small sample) with those finishing faster typically producing programs that worked better. So by any reasonable measure, at least 10x productivity.

There is your 10x, right? Wrong. They found that the best predictor of programmer performance was the performance of another programmer at the same company. Furthermore they managed to correlate a lot of that performance factor to specific factors, such as having a phone that turned off, a private room, adequate desk space, and so on. There was still something like an unexplained factor of 3 left over, but they didn't know whether it was environment variables they had not looked at (eg training), individual ability (which might be correlated across institutions), etc.

It is true that this research happened in the 80s, before the Internet was widespread. I would love to see it replicated again.

(Note, I'm aware of the existence of many other poorly controlled studies, see http://www.flownet.com/gat/papers/lisp-java.pdf for an example, but what is critical in the Peopleware study is that they acquired information both about productivity and about factors that might cause productivity differences.)

A huge class of such systems that are waiting to be created are crowd labor systems. How do you create leaderless organizations that produce what google or boeing or walmart produces and that compensates individuals for performance.

The answer today is a messy unorganized market system. Proper information systems that better organize that would create a lot of value. The analogy would be this site. Thousands of people communicating, without the organizing software it would be much worse (thousands of people standing around talking to each other, the good ideas spoken would not easily reach the top as it does in this organized software system).

tldr; the biggest value opportunities lie in CRUD apps, not the low level code

For example Paul Graham's essays are often very insightful, but they are frustratingly long. The core idea, which is the only reason why I am reading the essay, can be summarized into 1 - 3 sentences. The rest is just a boring extrapolation and repetition of that.