The summary of the issue by gnat at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good.... is quite good. I find McConnell's argument on "10x" (as a shorthand for "4x-20x") more defensible, and distrust the modality argument made by Bossavit, though Bossavit has additional reasons for why 10x is inappropriate.
Unless there's been new research in the last 4 years or so, I don't think there's anything more to say about this topic than what those two have written.
That link has some good references and conclusions based from data. There is a very likely chance that professional programmers can have an impact that is many times that of their colleagues.
The original article is the author's anecdotal evidence that a 10 times difference in productivity is caused by environment. It's enough to generate a hypothesis, at least. After reading a few of the references, I've found it's even harder to generate good data for this than I expected. It would be of no surprise to me that environment is a large confounding factor on what generates these "10x" programmers.
Comments
The summary of the issue by gnat at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/179616/a-good.... is quite good. I find McConnell's argument on "10x" (as a shorthand for "4x-20x") more defensible, and distrust the modality argument made by Bossavit, though Bossavit has additional reasons for why 10x is inappropriate.
Unless there's been new research in the last 4 years or so, I don't think there's anything more to say about this topic than what those two have written.
That link has some good references and conclusions based from data. There is a very likely chance that professional programmers can have an impact that is many times that of their colleagues.
The original article is the author's anecdotal evidence that a 10 times difference in productivity is caused by environment. It's enough to generate a hypothesis, at least. After reading a few of the references, I've found it's even harder to generate good data for this than I expected. It would be of no surprise to me that environment is a large confounding factor on what generates these "10x" programmers.