I know someone who is 10x more productive than his entire team, I worked in a next-door department and watched the beast do his magic. Truth be told, no one liked him. We couldn't keep up with him, all our bug reports would be several releases too old. We couldn't get him to install an IM client, he doesn't carry a phone, his email response rate is ~5%, several days too late, and only responds to say he can't make it to social gatherings, etc.

We wasted weeks holding meets to architecture something he already had in place, grrrr.

He wasn't a child, but a grown man with gray hair. Not exactly a prima dona either; he will happily talk to you for ours about your build problems and give you all the help you need. He was just not very good at communication. He was a fake "yes man"; he says yes to every request and suggestion, but somehow only his more sensible ideas end up in deployment.

I don't think someone who is 10x as productive, but emits zero feedback or communication is worth the trouble of poaching from others, specially of you're a big corp. Give him 10x market rate and let him bootstrap a startup all by himself, sure, but this particular guy would suck in a team environment.

He really didn't fit any "hacker" stereo-type either. He was a fit soccer player / yogi, worked strictly 9-6, and had a taste for illicit leisure .. I think.

>We couldn't get him to install an IM client, he doesn't carry a phone, his email response rate is ~5%, several days too late, and only responds to say he can't make it to social gatherings, etc

This is probably why he was so much more productive. I've personally turned off notification on my email and tend to set my IM to "away" because it's too distracting to productivity when people can just interrupt me at any moment. We already have a bloody meeting every morning. What ever you have to say can certainly wait until then. I wonder if anyone has done a study of how much money has been lost to these "open plan" working environments.

That's what "solid B+" players are for: the rented lakehouse party, the corporate kumbayas and sufficiently-buzzed Wednesdays at the bar across the man-made pond in the drab, suburban office park. That's where A+ players go to die. That's why even at mid-sized software companies, we didn't hire the A+ players because they make hiring managers and peers feel stupid and impotent.

I should know: I'm a B+ player.

And, if by "illicit leisure" you mean "smokes the herb", I think you'll find that alot of guru type hackers are WAY into that kinda stuff. In fact, at my company, our HR technical recruiter once said that if corporate all of a sudden started random drug testing, half of the developers would be gone before they could read THC on the LabCorp printout.

On the recreational pharmaceuticals point...

Year ago we were getting our second round of VC investment from a group of companies that included an American VC company (we were in the UK and our first round had been from UK VCs only).

I remember saying to our dev team "these guys want compulsory drug testing for all staff" (I was joking) - the looks of horror on the faces of the best developers in the team were priceless.

I've never used illegal drugs, and I would be horrified myself at that kind of request. I would see it as an indicator the VC company wanted a distrustful, adversarial relationship.

They didn't - I was joking about it :-)

One thing I've learned is some people artificially appear more productive by offloading unpleasant tasks. Some of those requests, for example, might have been things that customers specifically asked for. And someone else on the team would have had to implement them, maybe on top of their regular workload, just because this guy wouldn't. Some of those emails he wouldn't answer might have been blockers for other people. If you can get away with it, great, but eventually people will figure it out.

I respect him way too much to think that, but you're right, others have been the first line of defense when it comes to keeping up with changing specs. However, when those settled the requirements, he was able to chew through them quicker than anyone else.

He also had a deeper sense of memory. I was only a contractor and worked with them briefly, but from what I have seen, he was the one most aware of what has been tried before and failed. For example, his team made an impulse decision to outsource some chunks of the platform to a 3rd party app, but he was able to connect a few dots and point out that the 3rd party app uses a SOAP library, which in turn uses an http client lib, which uses something else, which they found to be non-reenterant .. or some such.

The rest would have discovered this later and ended up patching it, while he is able to make good decisions right from the start. It helps that he was super specialized, and done nothing but C++ and PHP, on Linux, for the last 15 years; while everyone else on the team had a broad encyclopedic knowledge of a lot of stuff.

How do you identify someone who is 10x more productive? The difference between good and great is not always apparent in an interview.

Perhaps developers with significant amounts of open source work could be identified but I'm sure that for every one of those there are several amazing developers who are instead working on proprietary stuff.

The difference between good and great is usually pretty obvious to former colleagues who are now at a new company that's hiring.

That's true, but are those colleagues allowed to talk about the work that the person did? At a lot of places, the only thing the manager can confirm is that the person worked there during the dates given on the resumé. Further questions are to be directed to HR, which will filter any genuine feedback the manager can give.

There's no objective method, but many experienced programmers are capable of using subjective measures. Indeed, such skills are a huge competitive advantage to established dev. shops with talent (hire the best, keep hiring the best).