It is a long held belief that top programmers are at least 10 times more productive than average programmers (some have said 100x more). They are not only more productive, but develop better/cleaner code.
A programmer typically spends 10-20% of his time writing code and most programmers write about 10-12 lines of code per day that goes into the final product. Top performing programmers spend the majority of their time thinking, researching, and experimenting to find the best approach. Under performing programmers spend the majority of their time debugging code often randomly making changes and seeing if they work.
“A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” –Bill Gates
A good programmer is maybe ten times more productive than an average programmer. A great programmer is 20-100 times more productive than the average. This is not an exaggeration – studies since the 1960′s have consistently shown this.
So if you have needs for top performing programmers, we’re happy to help!
Kate McCabe
VP, Eclaro