John Debay

Members of the Google Maps team in recent months have told colleagues they worry about Apple replacing their program, given that as many as half the people who access Google Maps own Apple devices, says someone familiar with the matter.

As many as half? Wow.

The New York Times runs a strong editorial today calling out Republican opposition tactics for thwarting economic-stimulus efforts. Then it bills that argument, via its headline, as a familiar, symmetric “partisan failure on both sides” diagnosis.

[Angelina] Jolie is able to attract aid to Darfur through her passion, her hard work, but ultimately through the fact that she’s the subject of a great deal of attention. While her recent films may not have attracted as much attention as her work as Lara Croft, she commands approximately 35 centiKardashians of attention.

The Kardashian is a unit I proposed a few classes back as a measure of attention. Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.

Steve discusses how the typical difference between the average of something and the best of something is typically 30%-50%. The example he uses is the difference between the average New York cab ride and the best New York cab ride. Maybe the best cab ride is 30% better than average. But the difference between an average programmer and the best programmer is more like 25:1. I think that’s exactly right and it’s certainly been borne out in my experience writing software for a living.

The comparison I like to use is poets. In high school, a class is asked to write a poem. To a person, what’s produced is mediocre garbage. Maybe there’s 1 or 2 people in the class that submit something not outright vomit-inducing, but that’s about the best you’re going to get. There are only so many Shakespeares in this world. The difference between a great programmer and a mediocre programmer is like the difference between Shakespeare and the frat boy who sat next to you in high school English.

Most non-programmers don’t get this, and tend to assume the variability among programmer ability isn’t very much, and that programmers are fungible, much like swapping out hard drives. The difference between companies that make great software and those that just make software can in a lot of cases be traced to the quality of their programmers. And the difficulty of writing software, and the associated dearth of good programmers, is why so few software companies produce anything worth anything at all.