Beyond 10×

In the January 1968 issue of computer science trade magazine Communications of the ACM , a paper appeared under the unassuming title “Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance.” “Programming is a multibillion dollar industry,” the paper begins, but given just how much money is spent on on their salaries, nobody had yet bothered to study how programmers work. So the authors broke new ground, creating a set of experiments to measure programmer productivity. Across d