As far as I know the 10x number was made popular by Fred Brooks, not a meme, and it has pretty real applications:
> Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. But the actual measured magnitudes have astounded all of us. In one of their studies, Sackman, Erikson, and Grant were measuring perfor-
mances of a group of experienced programmers. Within just this group the ratios between best and worst performances averaged
about 10:1 on productivity measurements and an amazing 5:1 on program speed and space measurements! In short the $20,000/year programmer may well be 10 times as productive as the
$10,000/year one.
He goes on to explain that because the primary cost in software development is the overhead of coordinating minds, a company is far better off paying for just a few really good programmers than they are 10 times that number of mediocre ones. Whether or not there's such a thing as a 10x programmer in isolation, this seems pretty self-evident and valuable to keep in mind.
> He goes on to explain that because the primary cost in software development is the overhead of coordinating minds, a company is far better off paying for just a few really good programmers than they are 10 times that number of mediocre ones.
If that’s really the primary cost, surely one of the metrics they studied variation in is the coordination cost imposed by the programmer on the company, they didn’t just naively assume the cost was the same but output different, right?
Because it seems like if it does vary, you’d want to minimize it by hiring the easiest to coordinate, and that might offset output differences in sone cases.
> Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. But the actual measured magnitudes have astounded all of us. In one of their studies, Sackman, Erikson, and Grant were measuring perfor- mances of a group of experienced programmers. Within just this group the ratios between best and worst performances averaged about 10:1 on productivity measurements and an amazing 5:1 on program speed and space measurements! In short the $20,000/year programmer may well be 10 times as productive as the $10,000/year one.
He goes on to explain that because the primary cost in software development is the overhead of coordinating minds, a company is far better off paying for just a few really good programmers than they are 10 times that number of mediocre ones. Whether or not there's such a thing as a 10x programmer in isolation, this seems pretty self-evident and valuable to keep in mind.