In one particular area of programming, competitive programming, productivity is easier to measure.
One might call Tomek Czaijka the Federer of algorithmic competitions. As of 1.5 yrs ago, he had made more than $130k off of TopCoder competitions [1]. Seeing as how he is still ranked 3rd, this figure might be outdated [2].
I can assure you the average TopCoder contestant who has competed over a comparable amount of time made way less than $130k/30 ~ $4300. Easily more than 30 times the productivity.
You can argue about how coding up toy programs compares to working on products. I suspect there is a strong correlation though.
As a point of reference, please consider Steve Newman, who co-wrote Writely which was subsequently acquired by Google and is today the word processor of Google Docs [3]. He must have made some money in the process and was also successful at topcoder.com [4].
That being said, I do knew similar people with astonishingly low "product" productivity.
In one particular area of programming, competitive programming, productivity is easier to measure.
One might call Tomek Czaijka the Federer of algorithmic competitions. As of 1.5 yrs ago, he had made more than $130k off of TopCoder competitions [1]. Seeing as how he is still ranked 3rd, this figure might be outdated [2].
I can assure you the average TopCoder contestant who has competed over a comparable amount of time made way less than $130k/30 ~ $4300. Easily more than 30 times the productivity.
You can argue about how coding up toy programs compares to working on products. I suspect there is a strong correlation though.
As a point of reference, please consider Steve Newman, who co-wrote Writely which was subsequently acquired by Google and is today the word processor of Google Docs [3]. He must have made some money in the process and was also successful at topcoder.com [4].
That being said, I do knew similar people with astonishingly low "product" productivity.
1. http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/07/06/...
2. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=14440...
3. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/262443_googlewritely10.htm...
4. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=SimpleStats&c=coder_ac...