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Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

I mean what would Steve Jobs know. He surely hasn't met many decent developers managing the Macintosh or NeXT teams or as CEO of an IT company with 100K+ employees.

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 ?

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As I said, why not 10:1 (a commonly repeated, equally unsupported ratio) 50:1 or 100:1? So no, the 25:1 number came from being in the unique position to spout precise-sounding, unsubstantiated numbers in an environment where nobody would argue with him. What did occur to me is there are no significant digits in that number.

Being pedantic, but I definitely have seen developers with zero productivity: so everyone else productive is infinitely better...

Excepting, there are also programmers and teams with negative productivity - work out the ratio!

Yes. But 25 is a suspiciously round number.

He might have done a quantitative study, but there's no indication that he did. If he'd shown his working and described his methodology then I'd believe him, but since he doesn't I estimate that he probably pulled that number ex anum.

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.

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