I'm pretty sure you can find 100x spread in developer compensation at Google. The ones who got in early vs. the ones who came after the IPO. They got in early because they were amazing, not because they were lucky. Not.
I don't doubt that a great engineer outperforms a mediocre one in productivity, ingenuity, innovation, whatever, but living by this as your mantra, and making hiring decisions around it as if it were a scientifically-proven study seems incredibly dangerous.
Haha, what a perfect quote! Thanks
Did it ever occur to you that 25:1 number might come from being in a unique position to compare the relative output of multiple engineering teams of similar sizes at Apple ?
There aren't any useful metrics for coder productivity anyway. You can measure lines per day, but that's not telling you what you want to know. The best programmers aren't best because they do simple tasks twenty-five times faster than the average programmer, they're the best because they do really difficult tasks in ways that the average programmer would never, ever do.
Excepting, there are also programmers and teams with negative productivity - work out the ratio!