Great Programmer Productivity - Accounting for 10,000 fold difference?

Posted by TheImpact on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by TheImpact
Published on 2011-09-25T21:14:19Z Indexed on 2012/12/17 23:13 UTC
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Productivity

"A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer." - Bill Gates

Say there's a "great" software engineer and an "average" software engineer on the same team. How can you account for one engineer being 10,000 times more productive? I can't quite fathom this, given they're both taking on their share of features, bugs and investigations, and consistently deliver with quality. Would my description possibly justify them to be above "average"? "great"?

In a corporation like Microsoft, what % of software engineers are "average"? What % "great"?

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