I think we should address 2 questions first before we can answer this. Why do some programmers think they are 10x or 100x more productive than others? Is it a myth or is it for real? Give some concrete examples of 10x productivity for a start.
Do you have any references for this, my good man? I don't mean to question your comment; I want to learn more about how this has been established and the nature of it.
I don't have any references to academic research, but my own experience interviewing people supports the claim. When presented with a simple coding problem, some people just breeze through it, others take most of the interview to finish it, and some candidates just can't solve it at all.
To the extent to which coding on a whiteboard is an indicator of real-world productivity, there definitely seems to be at least 5x difference.
I have worked with people who needed to see the whole picture before they could implement anything. Whereas I can seem to be able to jump in and start building even while lacking information. I have some weird ability (or perhaps not so weird, it is probably just a result of experience) to infer what is not yet there; the whole picture only becomes clear to me when I am done.
In those cases, I was seeing at least a 10x productivity increase because while they were sitting around thinking about the problem, I was already writing code, working on the parts that I did understand, while gaining a greater understanding of the rest during that process. Once we all reached the point of understanding, those gains became negligible, and our productivity was probably closer to par.
If you're writing the same old boilerplate code day in, day out, it is probably hard to realize increased productivity between individuals. However, if you're venturing into new problems constantly, I believe different developers can be quite a bit more productive over others.
There are many concrete examples where the productivity of a programmer may be positive or negative.
For example:
How many more tasks did you complete on average?
How much time did you require the assistance of your colleagues?
How many times per day do you interrupt other developers and prevent them from doing their job?
So the productivity multiplier is either over 1x or under 1x. When you multiply it up together for all the members of your team, and you normalize so that the lowest multiplier is 1x, you might realize that in fact some co-workers can be 100x more productive than others.
10 times is actually an understatement....For example Marco Arment made instapaper himself...try asking a 100 person team at xyz corp to make something like that!
