&gt; it’s comparing your best to your worst<p>To be clear, DeMarco found clustering, so it&#x27;s not <i>your</i> best to <i>your</i> worst, where <i>you</i> refers to a given organization. The gap appears only when looking interorganizationally. In the measured comparable tests they did one company had a lot of highly effective programmers, another company had a lot of ineffective programmers, and it wasn&#x27;t common to find mixtures of both kinds at any given company. So at a given company it will appear that everyone is similarly productive, and the people there may tend to believe 10:1 is a myth. The 10:1 is only apparent when comparing people interorganizationally.<p>Also, of course the productivity was not in terms of LOC per hour, but was in terms of several elements regarding solving a given problem correctly. In general the highest productivity people solved that given problem in 10x less time using 10x fewer LOC and 10x fewer bugs than the lowest productivity people who used more LOC to accomplish the same thing, introducing more bugs in the process, and taking more time to do so.