"When you say someone is 1000x as productive, that means that they sit down and do 3 years of work in 8 hours. (Unless the average developer contributes negative net productivity)"
Productivity is value to the organization. If it is an ecommerce entity, Mr. one nine cost the company 1000x in sales vs. Ms. four nines.
Your skepticism is noted. As I've said, sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up.
Would you claim a developer who replaced 1,000 lines of messy, poorly written code with a 10-line implementation of a more efficient algorithm is less productive than the person who wrote the 1,000 line mess?
sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up
At which point I guess we get down to what is an average developer. Does the average developer make such big screw-ups that simply not screwing up is 100x increase in performance?
I guess when I think "average", I'm not thinking about what is actually the measured average, but more like "acceptable competency". Never destroys shit, but also never advances the project a month with something clever. The sort of standard grade you would hope your rank-and-file would be made of.
What does lines of code really mean? If the messy code has a lower bug rate and is easier to debug, which is entirely possible if the 10-line solution is painfully elegant, it is the more productive of the two. Remember that old quote about how it takes twice the cleverness to debug code as it does to write it...
The average developer, in my mind, is a person right in the middle of the group of people who can maintain a position as a "programmer" or "developer" or any equivalent terms.
You've made a number of assumptions that I was trying to squash.
Most developers do not work on "projects". They're not doing startups or even working for software companies. They're anyone from the guy maintaining a FoxPro database for a dry cleaning chain to a jedi ninja who poops better, tighter, inventive code than the rest of us can dream of.
How do you measure someone's productivity in an environment where they write or patch code based on their manager coming around and asking them to do make tiny changes or write reports? As an analogy, how would you measure the productivity of the "hero" of Office Space? He turns two character dates into four character dates. He's a programmer, but he's not actually "producing" anything. He's keeping the world from ending in 2000! His manager would probably count his productivity as how many lines/files/whatever he updates in a given period of time.
The lines of code metric was an attempt to illustrate that productivity is a difficult task to measure without a goal-oriented context. You see that measuring productivity is not just "lines of code," but you also missed that the developer spent time refactoring 1,000 lines of code. Is that productive? Measured on that day, the work done was zero, or negative, and productivity can only be measured in the medium to long term. Yet I hope we would both agree that it was a productive effort.
In regards to 1,000 LOC vs. 10 LOC, I still maintain that I'd have to see it. Most of the time you'll be right, but that refactoring is not necessarily productive as a rule.
Productivity is value to the organization. If it is an ecommerce entity, Mr. one nine cost the company 1000x in sales vs. Ms. four nines.
Your skepticism is noted. As I've said, sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up.
Would you claim a developer who replaced 1,000 lines of messy, poorly written code with a 10-line implementation of a more efficient algorithm is less productive than the person who wrote the 1,000 line mess?