Even if it isn't the mythical 10x ratio, hiring somebody that can do 3 times more than the next person is a no-brainer. Although I honestly wonder if that baseline is dragged down so hard by all the people that really can't do the job they are supposed to be doing. Programming is hard, and doing it well is even harder. "Everyone can code" movements are great propaganda, but I'll be honest, I've never known anybody that actually could code who wasn't a couple of standard deviations smarter than the average Joe or Jane.

I'm much slower these days than I used to be, and it's because I'm bored. That I need to do my work with a web browser, usually necessarily with internet access doesn't help.

For the last year I've been working on a project that has a complex toolchain, such that every time I hit cmd-s I have to wait 2-5 seconds before I can reload the browser to see the changes. It's remarkable how easily I can get distracted in that short interval, especially if I experience it dozens of times per day.

For the last couple days I've been doing Project Euler with Ruby and the lack of lag time translates into much better focus.

I'm good at tests where you need to code fast and to a high level of quality. But there is no way is keep that speed up for 2k hours per year.

Another issue is of course the person who replays technical debt on every completed JIRA ticket will probably be a bit slower. And the person who removes lines of code and asks if a feature is really necessary is another beast. All that thinking is going to slow down your LOC per second.