On the value of Star Programmers in Product Development or Hitting the high notes

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame has written an excellent article on the value of star programmers in a product development team.

To summarize:
Star programmers significantly outperform average programmers often with 5-10 times difference in productivity.

However substituting 5 or 10 programmers instead of a star programmer doesn’t work because thay are not equivalent. Multiple programmers introduce communication and coordination overhead which is not present in a single prorammer.

Finally star programmers can hit that special high notes which can never be achieved by even thousands of Average Joe programmer.

I fully agree with his assessment based on personal experience. Software product development is an art form in many ways. In today’s environment where, like it or not, winner takes all it is more important than ever to hire and nurture star programmers.

Read Joel’s article here.