<i>While effectiveness can easily vary by 10x, a team charging a 50% premium has a tough sell.</i><p>The poster later hints at the correct solution, which he is too polite to say outright, which is that the best way to make money out of a guy who is ten times as productive as average is to team him with nine mouth-breathing idiots and charge the average rate for all of them. "Nine mouth-breathing idiots" is an exaggeration, but in the dot-com days you'd get one brilliant guy, two experienced coders, six recent grads who barely passed their sophomore data structures class, and one person whose role in the project was completely baffling. (He can't even read code, much less write it... he doesn't write documents... he doesn't know the design... he doesn't know what's going on on the project... is he a bodyguard? A chaperone? Why are we paying for him?) Some of the best developers I've met were the "one brilliant guy" on a big team we hired from a consulting firm.