I don't have access to the full article so I don't know if they looked at programmers specifically. (Anyone?) They found that, depending on the activity, practice accounted for about 0-25% of the performance. (Depending on where programmers fall in that range, if excellent programmers are 1000x more productive, I'd take deliberate practice for 250x, Alex.)
However, the assumption that, if practice as measured in these studies isn't the answer, then talent is, is obviously false. Quoting this response piece by Alfie Kohn:
"That’s not necessarily true, however. The question posed by Macnamara and her colleagues was appropriately open-ended: “We have empirical evidence that deliberate practice, while important, …does not largely account for individual differences in performance. The question now is what else matters.” And there are many possible answers. One is how early in life you were introduced to the activity — which, as the researchers explain, appears to have effects that go beyond how many years of practice you booked. Others include how open you are to collaborating and learning from others, and how much you enjoy the activity."
Regarding the first article, they discovered 9331 studies that studied the impact of practice on performance, and narrowed it down to 157 studies based on their criteria. The breakdown in terms of genre, number of studies, total number of participants, and % of variance in performance capable of being explained by deliberate practice was:
Music 28 1,259: 21%
Games 11 1,291: 26%
Sports 60 2,633: 18%
Professions 7 321: 1%
Education 51 5631: 4%
So not programmers specifically. I didn't read the paper very thoroughly and examine their methodology (perhaps their criteria were such that they were allowed to cherrypick results), but it seems to me that the professions category seems to suffer from particularly low sample size.
It's important to note that under deliberate practice, they did not include starting age. To explain the other ~80% of variance, they proposed starting age, general intelligence and working memory capacity. Pm me if you would like to see the article.
I'd be very interested to see what you're referring to. Citation needed.
edit: The only thing I can thing I can think of that you might be referring to is the recent meta-study of the impact of practice on performance:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/06/30/095679761453...
I don't have access to the full article so I don't know if they looked at programmers specifically. (Anyone?) They found that, depending on the activity, practice accounted for about 0-25% of the performance. (Depending on where programmers fall in that range, if excellent programmers are 1000x more productive, I'd take deliberate practice for 250x, Alex.)
However, the assumption that, if practice as measured in these studies isn't the answer, then talent is, is obviously false. Quoting this response piece by Alfie Kohn:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/...
"That’s not necessarily true, however. The question posed by Macnamara and her colleagues was appropriately open-ended: “We have empirical evidence that deliberate practice, while important, …does not largely account for individual differences in performance. The question now is what else matters.” And there are many possible answers. One is how early in life you were introduced to the activity — which, as the researchers explain, appears to have effects that go beyond how many years of practice you booked. Others include how open you are to collaborating and learning from others, and how much you enjoy the activity."
I recommend the entire article.