
  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


Say there's a "great" software engineer and an "average" software engineer on the same team. How can you account for one engineer being 10,000 times more productive? I can't quite fathom this, given they're both taking on their share of features, bugs and investigations, and consistently deliver with quality. Would my description possibly justify them to be above "average"? "great"?

The point of the quote isn't that one is 10K times more productive, it's that one is 10K times the worth of the other. Software has the unique condition where a defective design or implementation can lay dormant for years (a part that is machined wrong will usually just "not work" and not make it into the field), well into the life-cycle of the product until one day it rears its head in an intractable situation.

Everyone should be familiar with the exponential cost of fixing a defect as it moves from design, to implementation to testing to production to maintenance.

When you account for possible liability as well as corporate reputation, it is easy to conclude that the developer who knew enough to avoid the problem is worth 10,000 times the one who ignorantly or naively implemented a poor solution.

Edit (Spring 2014): "Heartbleed"
