It would be interesting to see companies genuinely compete for talented developers. I don't think the guys that are 10x as productive would be making 20% more anymore.
We wasted weeks holding meets to architecture something he already had in place, grrrr.
He wasn't a child, but a grown man with gray hair. Not exactly a prima dona either; he will happily talk to you for ours about your build problems and give you all the help you need. He was just not very good at communication. He was a fake "yes man"; he says yes to every request and suggestion, but somehow only his more sensible ideas end up in deployment.
I don't think someone who is 10x as productive, but emits zero feedback or communication is worth the trouble of poaching from others, specially of you're a big corp. Give him 10x market rate and let him bootstrap a startup all by himself, sure, but this particular guy would suck in a team environment.
He really didn't fit any "hacker" stereo-type either. He was a fit soccer player / yogi, worked strictly 9-6, and had a taste for illicit leisure .. I think.
I should know: I'm a B+ player.
And, if by "illicit leisure" you mean "smokes the herb", I think you'll find that alot of guru type hackers are WAY into that kinda stuff. In fact, at my company, our HR technical recruiter once said that if corporate all of a sudden started random drug testing, half of the developers would be gone before they could read THC on the LabCorp printout.
Year ago we were getting our second round of VC investment from a group of companies that included an American VC company (we were in the UK and our first round had been from UK VCs only).
I remember saying to our dev team "these guys want compulsory drug testing for all staff" (I was joking) - the looks of horror on the faces of the best developers in the team were priceless.
He also had a deeper sense of memory. I was only a contractor and worked with them briefly, but from what I have seen, he was the one most aware of what has been tried before and failed. For example, his team made an impulse decision to outsource some chunks of the platform to a 3rd party app, but he was able to connect a few dots and point out that the 3rd party app uses a SOAP library, which in turn uses an http client lib, which uses something else, which they found to be non-reenterant .. or some such.
The rest would have discovered this later and ended up patching it, while he is able to make good decisions right from the start. It helps that he was super specialized, and done nothing but C++ and PHP, on Linux, for the last 15 years; while everyone else on the team had a broad encyclopedic knowledge of a lot of stuff.
This is probably why he was so much more productive. I've personally turned off notification on my email and tend to set my IM to "away" because it's too distracting to productivity when people can just interrupt me at any moment. We already have a bloody meeting every morning. What ever you have to say can certainly wait until then. I wonder if anyone has done a study of how much money has been lost to these "open plan" working environments.
Perhaps developers with significant amounts of open source work could be identified but I'm sure that for every one of those there are several amazing developers who are instead working on proprietary stuff.