Very interesting. But that probably doesn't translate to professional projects where people have more incentive to contribute and core contributors the obligation to onboard and mentor new hires...
If he and I were employed together to work on this project, a workload distribution of me writing and maintaining the entire codebase (minus one line) and him coming by every couple months to update a version number would not be a very fair or realistic division of labor.
The open source development process is very different from anything else. None of my projects at work have a long tail of contributors submitting comment typo fixes.
Once your proof-of-concept grew into something management wanted, you'd probably still be writing a lot of the code, and the other developer would be contributing, but in the realm of 20% of the codebase, at least to start (and according to this article, that wouldn't change).
Maybe the results do apply to the situation you describe, I'd be curious to know that.
That's not very precise but I think people can relate to what I said.
I can say for sure that the quality of the things that I want to do will always have better quality on average than the things that I am paid to do.
I can certainly generalize that humans are not flexible, but I don't think that's limited to programmers.
Maybe this isn't what you meant, but why is it that human beings see someone they know producing a lot of value as diminishing the value produced by others, especially in technical matters?
Why? Because the mba will see a metric elevated and use that to define a norm. Now they only want to hire 10x performers. They don't know how to find them so they invent this complex hiring process that filters out so many good candidates they have no chance of ever finding that 10x developer. They settle on the fake 10x who speaks well and presents all of the right signals. The dev comes in and struggles and blames the code/past developer/way something is done and claims a rewrite is needed in a new and trendy language. This prompts a huge rewrite that takes place over a year at the end of which its determined that nothing works and that project gets cancelled. By this point that developer has been promoted to your manager.