Comment by necovek
5 years ago
You went from "10x the average" (which the claim is about) to 10x between arbitrary people: it's obvious why the latter is true (some people just need to terribly suck at something), it's harder to buy into the 10x the average performance because of... how hard it is to define (improvement in) performance when you are not starting off of (near) zero.
No, you have it backwards. The original claim about “10×” engineers is in the book Peopleware. The author specifically claimed that they had observed at least an order of magnitude difference between the best and the worst software engineers. This is very much talking about variation between individuals, not comparing the extremes to the average. The average engineer is I guess somewhere around 3×, but note that this was a qualitative statement rather than a quantitative one; I chose the geometric mean because we are talking about multiples, but we shouldn’t forget that this isn’t based on concrete numbers. The average could be 2× or 5× or anything else.
Note that they are referring to the worst software engineers that could keep their jobs; these people probably still had net positive productivity for their companies. Note also that this was across many companies that the author had consulted for; any individual company likely had a narrower range of ability. Because of company policies, management styles (aka manglement), mistakes, cost–cutting, or whatever, there are companies that absolutely fill up with 1× programmers. Also, the best and worst programmers are not necessarily at the same stage of their career; the 10× engineer is much more likely to be a greybeard who has seen it all and knows how to get results, while the 1× engineers are much more likely to be fresh out of college.
The whole point of the book is that we can deliberately set up an environment where engineers are allowed to grow and succeed, or we can set up an environment that drives away anyone with skill. If management can do the former, then the company can succeed. Too often management sets up a system that is actively hostile to success, and then has to hire consultants to come and tell them how to fix it.
Great, thanks for the detailed clarification — I wasn't aware of the book reference: it was my impression that everybody compares to an "average engineer" when talking about 10x, so perhaps it has entered "common knowledge" as a misinterpretation (or maybe it's just my misinterpretation, which is most likely).
It’s a very, very common misinterpretation. People see the number 10× and immediately go to the straw–man of the mythical average programmer.
The study they referred to removed all cases where the student didn't finish the project, so it doesn't have any data points for the worst engineers.