Well, no. The Pareto Distribution is a parametrisable line on a graph - without evidence, it shows nothing. You clearly have faith that it applies to productivity of developers, and indeed it might, but without data statistics tells you nothing. This is without trying to get into defining what "productivity" means, which is terribly difficult.
With my statistician hat on, a far more sound argument for the data-minimalist is as follows: Given the number of developers in existence the probability there there does not exist a developer who is ten times more productive than the mean is vanishingly small by the law of large numbers, therefore the 10x developer exists. This statement holds pretty much regardless of the definitions of "productive" (assuming the distribution of the productivity of developers is long-tailed) or even "developer".
Whether or not the above statement has any worth is left as an exercise to the reader.
Aging Java back-end guy. Ironically although I got my github thinking I'd fill it with nifty stuff I'd do in Java on my own time, I've ended up sticking a load of JavaScript on it instead!
My gut feeling is that it'll follow a normal distribution curve (bell curve) rather than a Pareto distribution, possibly skewed up or down depending on various factors like team morale, buy-in to the project, and environmental factors (Oh WHEN are they going to fix the air-con in here?! It's too hot to think!). Most people don't like to do worse than average for the team because obviously they don't want to be seen as dragging their velocity down - but equally if one person does so much more than anyone else it can create bad feeling because it's putting pressure on everyone else to perform better than they're comfortable doing & it's making people look bad. Nobody likes a teacher's pet, so to speak.
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Well, no. The Pareto Distribution is a parametrisable line on a graph - without evidence, it shows nothing. You clearly have faith that it applies to productivity of developers, and indeed it might, but without data statistics tells you nothing. This is without trying to get into defining what "productivity" means, which is terribly difficult.
With my statistician hat on, a far more sound argument for the data-minimalist is as follows: Given the number of developers in existence the probability there there does not exist a developer who is ten times more productive than the mean is vanishingly small by the law of large numbers, therefore the 10x developer exists. This statement holds pretty much regardless of the definitions of "productive" (assuming the distribution of the productivity of developers is long-tailed) or even "developer".
Whether or not the above statement has any worth is left as an exercise to the reader.
My gut feeling is that it'll follow a normal distribution curve (bell curve) rather than a Pareto distribution, possibly skewed up or down depending on various factors like team morale, buy-in to the project, and environmental factors (Oh WHEN are they going to fix the air-con in here?! It's too hot to think!). Most people don't like to do worse than average for the team because obviously they don't want to be seen as dragging their velocity down - but equally if one person does so much more than anyone else it can create bad feeling because it's putting pressure on everyone else to perform better than they're comfortable doing & it's making people look bad. Nobody likes a teacher's pet, so to speak.