With a grain of salt

Posted Jul 28, 2009 19:07 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd by tialaramex
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

What you say has a kernel of truth, but I think you are stretching it too thin. It is true that a superstar developer can do more work than ten mediocre workers, but not "dozens". And that is only developing; creating documentation, helping others on mailing lists etc. does not scale the same way. Also, dedication varies wildly from the paid developer to the person that can dedicate a few odd nights; if your star developer is in the last position he or she will probably produce less than a dedicated but less gifted cooperator.

Finally, notice the "mediocre" bit in "ten mediocre workers". At work you have surely experienced what these "mediocre" people look like: social butterflies, people uninterested in technology but looking for high salaries, climbers up the corporate ladder... These are the people that lower the average. In most open source projects they are not a problem, so differences in skill and productivity are rather in the same ballpark. A really good guy might do the job of two or three others, but not much more. In this light, your sentence:

Get rid of one superstar and attract five competent people and you may find your project is struggling even more than before...

does not really hold water.

to post comments

With a grain of salt

Posted Jul 28, 2009 23:21 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

It is true that a superstar developer can do more work than ten mediocre workers, but not "dozens".

Sure it's true. One developer might be able to achieve things that no amount of mediocre developers could.

With a grain of salt

Posted Jul 29, 2009 19:00 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I stand corrected; for several categories of work, one developer can do things that hosts of others cannot. (For ordinary, every day grunt work not so much.)

With a grain of salt

Posted Jul 29, 2009 1:05 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

What you say has a kernel of truth, but I think you are stretching it too thin. It is true that a superstar developer can do more work than ten mediocre workers, but not "dozens".

I think the original poster was correct and possibly even understated things. One excellent developer can often make the difference between success and failure. One superstar can sometimes produce something an infinite number of average programmers could never produce. This has been my experience as a professional software developer for the last 20 years or so.

I want to include more people in FOSS development so we're more likely to discover superstars.

With a grain of salt

Posted Jul 29, 2009 6:40 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

That is true, we are assuming that the superstars are men (because they have traditionally been), but that does not need to be the case. It seems that Asperger's syndrome is more common in men, so the archetypal superstar developer that manages to annoy everyone should be more often a man than a woman. On the plus side, you might find a superstar developer that does not annoy people.