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I agree that hiring is random and the focus should be on making a star team. That is what I have done and I'm pretty happy with how it has turned out. Have you ever seen a big change in the level of productivity of a given programmer that isn't related to longer term general experience ( an average programmer with 10 years of experience should be more productive than an average programmer with 1 year of experience ).

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I'm not sure it scales like that for that long, sure there are benefits of familiarity with a language or system, the major changes in productivity I've seen come about through cross-skilling you can only expect the majority of devs or BAs or whatever to reach a certain level of competence when constrained to their core roles, encourage them to develop skills outside their usual BAU activities and the mutants you get back are an asset both in individual productivity and team redundancy.

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