Programmer Moneyball: Challenging the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity
A pervasive belief in the field of software engineering is that some programmers are much, much better than others (the times-10, or x10, programmer), and that the skills, abilities, and talents of these programmers exert an outsized influence on that...
Hasnain says:
Interesting analysis of data from student and employee productivity metrics - trying to debunk the 10x programmer notion.
I personally think the data is intriguing but then the jump at the end to concrete suggestions seems unfounded - they do say there’s more posts coming, however.
“The idea that top performers can easily be identified and can then be expected to improve productivity may represent a hasty conclusion based on small and insufficient data samples. It takes a substantial body of work to evaluate a programmer's true performance. We had 10 samples each in our study, with identical requirements, under controlled conditions, with no distractions, and it was barely enough data to draw meaningful conclusions. The real world, of course, is far more complex than the limited, controlled study that we conducted.”
Posted on 2020-02-02T19:09:10+0000