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I overall agree with you on "Code Complete", but where did you find data that disproves 'orders of magnitude programmer's productivity'? I can't reach the linked website.

I'd be genuinely interested to check that. While still anecdotal, my experience from working in big and small companies in 4 countries is that there certainly is a absurdly wide gap in productivity between programmers.

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Original source FOR the "orders of magnitude" claim seem to usually point back to Fred Brooks Mythical Man Month (5-10x) or Robert Glass (Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering) 28x. I don't think either of these multipliers are accurately expressed as "orders of magnitude", regardless of them being supported by evidence.

There is some discussion of the topic in "Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It."

Hmmm. I agree that 'orders' is not an appropriate choice of words.

But I usually don't interpret this kind of claims literally, so I took the GP remark as saying that in practice (IRL) there was no such 'wide gap in productivity', which is opposite to claims/data I saw before (as you mention, 5-20x) and to my own experience.

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