The End to the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity
William R. Nichols · IEEE Software · 2019
One often-quoted truism in software engineering is that good programmers are "much much better" than bad programmers. The size of "much much better" is widely debated, but ranges such as 10 times more productive are often cited as conservative estimates. This article argues that such statements are misleading and miss numerous important effects. Based on the studies described later, it would appear that some programmers are not inherently exceedingly better than others.