Very Interesting

From: CatB: On Management and the Maginot Line

"My friend, familiar with both the open-source world and large closed projects, believes that open source has been successful partly because its culture only accepts the most talented 5% or so of the programming population. She spends most of her time organizing the deployment of the other 95%, and has thus observed first-hand the well-known variance of a factor of one hundred in productivity between the most able programmers and the merely competent.

The size of that variance has always raised an awkward question: would individual projects, and the field as a whole, be better off without more than 50% of the least able in it? Thoughtful managers have understood for a long time that if conventional software management's only function were to convert the least able from a net loss to a marginal win, the game might not be worth the candle."

Get rid of 50% of the less able programmers in the market. Good plan. Those of us that are more able will get better salaries and a happier day at work. If we culled off those who entered the profession because it paid well, and they liked computer games. Those who aren't interested in Programming really.

Then people wouldn't get narked at the people fucking up shit they have to clean up as much. Higher quality code would be produced without the dross poluting the CVS/SourceSafe/SubVersion repositories. Bad design would be less common.

And like I said, with a smaller, more talented pool to draw on, we'd have higher salaries in better jobs.

You really ought to do the same to the pool of IT project managers with no skill or training who bumble along fucking up the project even when it is purely consisting of the top 50% of talent.