Does this imply we are headed towards a future where there isn't a 10x difference between the best programmers and the worst? Where someone comes up with repeatable training that can help programmers advance throughout their career?
We simply do not spend a serious amount of time on learning/practicing correctly. We spend the majority of our time "cutting code" rather than on skills development.
Even the average google developer mostly does work which doesn't really push them. They are still learning but at a much slower pace than they could be. So we aren't really learning quickly at work.
Maybe 20% of the profession spends a serious amount of time (5+ hours a week) on software development outside of work. Of those the vast majority are either mostly "doing" by working on an idea/open source (aka a lot of the HN crowd) or learning the latest and greatest framework/language etc while ignoring the huge gaps in their fundamentals.
Young Composer: "Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing a symphony. How should I get started?"
Mozart: "A symphony is a very complex musical form and you are still young. Perhaps you should start with something simpler, like a concerto."
Young Composer: "But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old."
Mozart: "Yes, but I never asked anyone how."
I guess my point is, for a given training program, you're going to have a wide distribution of effectiveness of graduates.
But if you take 10 mozarts, who don't have a father who is a music teacher, doesn't have a sister whom he can watch getting trained and his own training doesn't start at 4.
I'd doubt if they would do anything in Music. Let alone become some one like mozart.
The Jacksons. Joe Jackson pushed his kids really really hard often to the point of abuse. All of them are good singers now but only one of them became Michael Jackson.
Basically Jermaine was heavily marketed when he went solo and even had a bidding war for his services. But it was MJ who was the star and for lack of a better term had the "it" factor.
Michael was in another league altogether. Even Quincy Jones says about Michael , "Sometimes the hand of god just lingers a bit longer over someones head".
It is significantly higher than 10x. The "problem" is that a) talent is wasted, b) talent is concentrated, c) talent is context based, and d) we apply the term "rock-star" to basically anyone better than average.
Usually there is only a 2-3x difference between team members and so a guy at google who is a 10x'er is likely only 2x as good as the rest of the team. But the average googler is in the top20% of the industry and is 3-4x better than the average dev.
Regarding c) I'm a 5-10x'er when working with large legacy code bases in a specific domain. Put me in a lean startup though and I am average at best.
Example 1) A good games developer can easily create a game in a week that would take the average developer months. The average dev has never even developed a game before.
Example 2) Have you ever worked on a large codebase (500,000+ loc)? Fixing a defect in a codebase that kind of size is not something you can easily google. A person who has experience with large enterprise systems knows the kinds of typical architectures they have and if trying to find the source of a bug knows how to heuristically carve up the solution and perform a kind of log n search. A developer without this kind of experience has to look at almost the entire search space.
Example 3) A developer medical domain knowledge can quickly determine if the requirements for a new bit of medical software actually make sense and are a reasonable approach to the problem. A great developer without this domain experience is going to have many more false starts.
Of course in the real world the disparities between individual developers are not that apparent because we work as teams and help each other out. E.g. In the enterprise example a more senior member will usually help you narrow down the search space even if just with a simple "oh for that kind of problem you need to check for x in the audit tables" or a "go talk to Steve about that as he is an expert in that subsystem"
Also a 10 programmer at a startup may suck (or even get fired!) in a traditional corp and vice versa.
Then even just focusing on programming a C++ guru may struggle with Haskell. Just as a football star may not win a 100m sprint against athletes in that field, but will do better than joe average.