"If our newly-independent programmer does not make 10x the money, we must admit that she is not the 10x programmer we thought she was." Not a good metric. The signal is at least polluted by social skills and geography - in some areas of the midwest, the social construct of the traditional company is much more entrenched than in some places in CA. Also, I'm 29 and I have no family - I could work totally different places and locations than a family man with roots, which opens up my possibilities much more. imho, conflating the concept of profitability and productivity is not a good idea.
I'm actually a skeptic on the generic x10 programmer-productive claim but the claim "Markets tend to clear" when applied anything and everything is more of a justifying fiction than a useful measure. Alan Greenspan and friends used it repeated to justify the housing bubble. And yet this kind of reasoning is still here.
I'm actually a skeptic on the generic x10 programmer-productive claim
Why? There have been many studies of this and their findings are consistent. IIRC the numbers range from 5-to-1 to 100-to-1 with the median in the order-of-magnitude range.
Pages 14-15 of Robert Glass' Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering cover this topic.
