&gt;Definitely not true! I have been in companies where 1 engineer outperformed 10 others with everything else being the same and on the same team. It was really obvious too. It does happen.<p>I believe 2x, 3x maybe 4x but 10x seems far fetched. Are you normalizing for hours worked in your appraisal of performance?<p>Per the arguments laid out in Peopleware I am opposed to my team members working more than 45-50 hours a week outside of rare crunch times.