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No Silver Programmers


By Larry O'Brien
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February 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Programming talent is not normal. There are some professional developers who are very much better than average and some who are very much worse, but it doesn’t seem that these talents fall along the neat “bell curve” created by the normal, or Gaussian, distribution. I say “seem” because, as boring as it is to say “the data are lacking,” there is astonishingly little real, peer-reviewed studies of individual programmer productivity. This is especially true of studies of professionals; it’s dubious to extrapolate the real-world distribution of talent from studies of computer science students, if for no other reason than the very large number of self-educated developers in the workforce.

Studying programmer productivity is made harder by the non-linear difficulty of software. A 500-line utility is not likely to be just 10 times less complex than a 5,000-line program, and a 50,000-line application is certainly more than an order of magnitude harder still. Studies of programming contests and homework challenges largely miss the dynamics that kick in when a system involves many moving parts and can only be immediately grasped as a collection of abstractions.

Perhaps most importantly, professional software development is a team sport, and there’s no simple way to measure an individual’s overall contribution to success. Nonetheless, the studies that do exist reinforce the intuition that there is great variance in both individuals and teams.

The question of talent distribution is important because it implies certain team structures. If, as some would have it, the striking thing about the distribution is that some developers are extraordinarily more productive (the “superstar” hypothesis), then it might make sense to structure software development along the lines of surgical teams, where the majority of the team is working to support the productivity of the single leader. In the early 1970s, IBM’s Harlan Mills advocated just this approach, contrasting this team structure with “a hog butchering team,” in which everyone has the same job description. (Not that the choice between being a surgeon or a hog butcher has any emotional leverage!)



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