> To think that one can casually split a project 1000 ways is assuming the mythical man month.
But I never said that. Quite a lot of people are reading my comment wrongly.
Like I said, I don't doubt that some devs are more productive than others. The question is whether it's worth paying up for the top guy, as opposed to the next guy. I never said you can just divide the top guy's salary by n average guys.
In a sports situation, the power law is much steeper. It's adversarial. And all the merchandise arguments connect to this too, it's all the same, the top guys kill and eat everything, everyone else around them are like housekeepers, they have work because it would not make sense to have CR7 do anything other than score goals. It's even well known that he doesn't track back, others have to fill in the defensive hole for him, and it's worth it.
It's also a principle of good software that other people should be able to understand your code. That's cooperative. Number 2 might be worse than number 1, but he doesn't get pummelled. Hopefully if you have a top character on your team, he helps everyone get better.
It's often not very obvious where the productivity is coming from, though of course everyone wants you to think it's them. In sports you can have the entire movement history of a player for every match they've ever played in. You know who is fast, who scores, who makes the passes, etc. And you have a well defined metric for what the goal is, and those goals have been static since the dawn of time. In business, you have constantly moving goalposts. Quick and dirty can beat well-thought, best-practice engineering. People have heterogenous roles, and you don't know what they're doing every minute of every day. That makes it a lot harder to think about who is better.
This all leads to the curve of reasonable pay being a lot less steep. I'm not saying there's no curve.