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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Programming as a field exhibits a weird bimodal distribution of talent. Some people are just in it for the paycheck, but others think of it as a true intellectual and creative challenge. Not only does the latter group spend extra hours perfecting their art, they also tend to be higher-IQ. Most of them could make better money in the law/medicine/MBA path. So obviously the "programming is an art" group is going to have a low opinion of the "programming is a paycheck" group.
Do we have any refs for this? I know there's "The Camel Has Two Humps" (Alan Kay on it, the PDF), but anything else?
And going by his other papers, though, it looks like the effect isn't nearly so strong as was originally claimed. (Though that's wrt whether his "consistency test" works, didn't check about whether bimodalness still holds.)
No, just personal experience and observation backed up by stories and blog posts from other people. See also Joel Spolsky on Hitting the High Notes. Spolsky's line is that some people are just never going to be that good at programming. I'd rephrase it as: some people are just never going to be motivated to spend long hours programming for the sheer fun and challenge of it, and so they're never going to be that good at programming.
This is a good null hypothesis for skill variation in many cases, but not one supported by the research in the paper gwern linked.
Fixed that for you. :) (I'm a current law student.)
In addition to this, if you're a good bricklayer, you might do, at most, twice the work of a bad bricklayer. It's quite common for an excellent programmer (a hacker) to do more work than ten average programmers--and that's conservative. The difference is more apparent. My guess might be that you hear this complaint from good programmers, Barry?
Although, I can guarantee that everyone I've met can do at least FizzBuzz. We have average programmers, not downright bad ones.