What Does It Mean to Be "Good" At Making Software?
Statements abound about the productivity of people who make software. Many people claim that some programmers are 10x more productive than others—http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/01/10/some-programmers-really-are-10x-more-productive/. What does that mean?
Presumably, to come up with a quantity, even a relative one like "10x," we have some quantitative measure that can be applied to people who make software in different contexts. What is that quantity? The number of significant lines of code written? If so, should we sack programmers who write -2000 lines of code in a day—http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt?
How about the time taken to fix a bug, the measure originally applied (to a small number of programmers) to discover the 10x figure? Maybe the programmers aren't more productive, but we caught them on a good day? What about the programmer who spent more time ensuring...