Flipside: it looks like the most productive programmers are those who work alone and not in a large pool. The core point of the article is that team development is slower and less efficient.
Which means management must make a choice: getting good code relatively fast from a small pool of high-value individuals that it must therefore cherish and treat well...
Or get poor-quality code, slowly, but from a large and redundant group of less skilled developers, who are cheaper and easier to replace.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that from the three characteristics of "good, fast, and cheap", you can pick which two you want.
In this case, maybe the choice is as simple as "good and fast" or "cheap."
If the structure of the business or the market requires management to pick "cheap" (with concomitant but unspoken "bad and slow") then the structure, I submit, is bad.
Which means management must make a choice: getting good code relatively fast from a small pool of high-value individuals that it must therefore cherish and treat well...
Or get poor-quality code, slowly, but from a large and redundant group of less skilled developers, who are cheaper and easier to replace.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that from the three characteristics of "good, fast, and cheap", you can pick which two you want.
In this case, maybe the choice is as simple as "good and fast" or "cheap."
If the structure of the business or the market requires management to pick "cheap" (with concomitant but unspoken "bad and slow") then the structure, I submit, is bad.