Is there a 10x gap between best and average programmers?

The article talks about differences between &quot;best&quot; and &quot;average&quot; programmers, but none of the papers cited support this. They say <i>there are 10x productivity differences among programmers.</i> That&#x27;s best vs worst, not best vs average. Quoting Spolsky&#x27;s linked article: <i>The fastest students were finishing three or four times faster than the average students and as much as ten times faster than the slowest students.</i>

I haven&#x27;t met a 10X programmer, so maybe I am one? Seriously, though, I will say there is easily a 3X differences in productivity of teams that are well managed verses teams that are poorly managed. I don&#x27;t have controlled data to prove it- tickets and lines of code aren&#x27;t good measures, but the latter one shows more than 3x difference.