Thank you. Every software is essentially being built by a few greats fighting against a dozen morons. 10x doesn't even get close to reality.
We're currently in deep shit because a long term dev was under the assumption that you can only instantiate objects once. He built an insanely complex system around the belief, which shipped. Our users used that system to write configuration files that now drive a machine that cost about half a billion dollars. So we can barely change anything because the data must be supported for 25 years.
The cost of such fools is orders of magnitude higher than their salary. I'm convinced that the world would be a better place without bad devs. Everything would be faster with less people, too.
The skill gradient is steep. Broadly speaking a top quintile dev will have 5-10x the productivity of the median dev, but only 110-150% of their salary. A bottom quintile dev will have zero impact, negative impact, or .1x impact relative to a median. The goal is to have the top quintile for your project, whether that is product engineers working on b2b saas, or graphics devs working on improvements to game rendering.
We're currently in deep shit because a long term dev was under the assumption that you can only instantiate objects once. He built an insanely complex system around the belief, which shipped. Our users used that system to write configuration files that now drive a machine that cost about half a billion dollars. So we can barely change anything because the data must be supported for 25 years.
The cost of such fools is orders of magnitude higher than their salary. I'm convinced that the world would be a better place without bad devs. Everything would be faster with less people, too.