If one person can really do the work of ten, you can save money on overhead:
- Fewer managers - a group of 10 will probably require a programming lead who spends some fraction of their time not coding.
- One tenth the amount of office space and hardware.
- Only paying for one person's health insurance instead of ten peoples'.
- Vastly reduced communications overhead - a team of 10 people is going to spend a lot of time communicating with each other to insure that everyone is doing what they need to be doing.
So I'm guessing you'll come out ahead even if you do pay ten times more for ten times the productivity. But companies rarely even pay twice as much for a developer who is exceptionally productive.
The downside of having one person doing the work of ten is that it's a disaster when the person decides to quit - it's the equivalent of a whole team of people simultaneously quitting.
Well, yeah, if you actually pay <10x when all is counted but get an actual 10x more, then you will have gained, but grandparent said "they won't pay 10x for 10x."
My tongue is in my cheek or some other such place right now because I kinda find this 10x business a bit funny, given that we can't even roughly quantify productivity. The thing I do believe in is that some people fit some kinds of work so well that it's silly to consider many other seemingly similarly qualified people as a practical alternative; as in, a hammer is good at hammering and it's not a question of it being 10x better than a shoe or 5x, it's just silly to hammer with a shoe, just don't do it. This is obvious but if phrased as "hammers are 10x shoes", it loses its obviousness and gains ridiculousness.
- Fewer managers - a group of 10 will probably require a programming lead who spends some fraction of their time not coding.
- One tenth the amount of office space and hardware.
- Only paying for one person's health insurance instead of ten peoples'.
- Vastly reduced communications overhead - a team of 10 people is going to spend a lot of time communicating with each other to insure that everyone is doing what they need to be doing.
So I'm guessing you'll come out ahead even if you do pay ten times more for ten times the productivity. But companies rarely even pay twice as much for a developer who is exceptionally productive.
The downside of having one person doing the work of ten is that it's a disaster when the person decides to quit - it's the equivalent of a whole team of people simultaneously quitting.