There's no one programmer who does the work of ten other programmers

I think there's some confusion about the definition of "work" here. Most programmers are rather like powerful sports cars stuck in six inches of snow -- the wheels are spinning very fast, but no useful progress is being made.

Does a great programmer write ten times as many lines of code as an average programmer? Probably not.

Does a great programmer solve ten times as many problems / create ten times as much functionality as an average programmer? Absolutely.

This comment redefines terms to make a point. Instead of doing ten times the work, a super hacker finds a way to shrink the amount of the work by 90%.

It amounts to the same thing, but it's still a good perspective. In this sense you could say that people don't actually get more done when they switch from Struts and Hibernate to Ruby on Rails - they just don't have as much to do.

I like to think of programming like building a house of cards. A great card house builder would necessarily have ot take care building the foundation of his card house. In fact, he may require more time early on than an inferior builder.

However, once the house of cards gets large enough, the great builder can build much faster than the inferior builder, not because the great builder is building any less carefully, but because the inferior builder must take more and more time to place each new card, perhaps even being forced to rebuild portions of the structure.

At some point, the inferior builder can no longer extend his structure for fear of breaking large portions of his creation.

As a result, the superior builder not only builds the higher levels faster, but he is able to reach levels that inferior builders can only aspire to reach.