A lot of people can write code, but on the path to making a shippable product a ton of programmers don’t have clarity on “what to write next” to arrive at the finish line. It often seems like a product is 80 or 90 percent done, but by the time it is actually shippable as a product, 2x or 4x or more work will be done, and major revisions of the code will happen to reach that point. The real 10x programmers are the ones that have done this enough times that they don’t get distracted doing naive things that will be discarded and redone as often.

I wonder if this study looked at a lot of programmers who just fix bugs or add well-defined features to apps, or really distinguish between those people and people who can build shippable products from ideas.