With a grain of salt

With a grain of salt

Posted Jul 29, 2009 1:05 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: With a grain of salt by man_ls
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".

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.

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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.