alt Hacker NewsTBH it was already pretty bad. There is a stark difference between the best and the average in my experience. The top, say, ten percent of coders are vastly better than anyone else when it comes to anything but boilerplate glue code(which is still needed and is better done by average coders anyway).
This is speaking from my experience as a systems/c/c++ guy. If you are a js web frontend guy, python, or whatever I have no idea if this applies to you.
Yea, it does apply. Honestly I'd argue that as you move up the abstraction layer cake, it applies even more. If a team gets a tool which 2x's their output (maybe a higher level language vs writing in C), then the difference in absolute output someone who produces 1 widget per day and 5 widgets per day becomes substantial. If you're given a tool which 10x's your output in a day, then it's even bigger. And of course you can have devs on a team who produce -.5 widgets per day.
Think about the worst colleague you've had, now give them a tool which 10x's their output :)