When I was 27 I would have found offensive to be called "a 27-year-old". Which age range do you need to belong to to be taken seriously?
Because if he had been 67, he would also be referred to with a dismissive "a 67-year-old".
Because if he had been 67, he would also be referred to with a dismissive "a 67-year-old".
I have a hard time believing that for programmers. 10x maybe, not 100x. If this were true, they should be making tremendously more than median programmers. When was the last time you heard about a software engineer employee making over $1m, let alone $10m?
Peopleware claims 10x.
Employers don't have any incentive to pay an especially effective programmer at whatever his "market rate" actually is. They just need to pay enough to fill their position with someone skilled, and there's plenty of programmers who'll take the near-guarantee of $MaxSalary/yr and live happily. ("After you've got enough to settle down and buy hardware whenever you need it, what else do you need?") If you want to realize your full "fair market value" (which is just a convenient theoretical fiction anyway), you need to take matters into your own hands.
I also don't think there's a consistent 100x variation in overall productivity/output, but maybe something more like maximum productivity (and edited the grandparent post). If you have a super-productive employee it's going to be hard to "fully saturate the pipeline" since any one single project isn't going to constantly require that level of work, and you can't just have him hop project to project within the company since there's a learning curve each time.
I originally picked up the "programmer productivity varies a lot" meme from one of PG's essays, but have since seen it in industry: http://paulgraham.com/gh.html
Exactly. employees don't make make over $1m, but plenty of founders who sold startups have.
Anyway, Paul Graham wrote a pretty convincing essay about this.
The reason they mention he's 27 is because it's unusual for someone that age to be a financial shark. Just like they can't stop talking about Brett Favre being 5-0 at 40, or if a 65-year-old won a Wii tournament that would be news, and by the time you reach 100, well, they just won't be able stop using the word centenarian every time your name comes up.
[Edit: I mean, if you read the article, he clearly was being taken quite seriously. He nearly took over the bloody thing. Interpreting the mention of his age as "dismissive" is silly - it's just context, in much the same way that his nationality, sex, and name are just context.]
Unless you happen to be referring to the media quotes in the article itself (e.g. "meddling kid", "ultimate poster boy for the much-maligned Generation Y", etc.), in which case you have a point. [2nd edit: Although, that still isn't really "not taking him seriously". It's just insulting him, though I will concede the possibility that part of the cause of the insults is his relative youth.]
On another note, the man the article is about is clearly either a genius or insane. Either way, it's an excellent story.