Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of employees in an organization do 50% of the work. In tech, especially software development, its even more extreme—the top 10-30% of your team might be doing 10x the output of everyone else. But whether you’re painting houses, writing code, or manufacturing cars, this pattern emerges.

But as a leader it gets even more interesting. The bottom 10% are probably doing zero work, or maybe even negative work (creating technical debt, breaking builds, requiring constant hand-holding). The top performers are cranking out features, solving the hardest problems, and moving the needle forward dramatically. But that leaves the majority of your team in the middle. They’re doing work. They’re probably doing their best. They’re just not operating at that 10x level. So what are you supposed to do?

Option 1: The Fred Brooks Model

Fred Brooks introduced the concept of the surgical team in The Mythical Man-Month. The idea is simple: identify your superstar and build a support team around them. In a modern engineering context, this means your 10x developer becomes the architect and primary code author, while the middle performers handle the supporting work—writing tests, maintaining documentation, managing infrastructure and devops pipelines, handling scans and reviews, etc.

This approach can work well on smaller teams and if you have positive morale. Your high performer stays focused on high-value work, while the team around them multiplies their effectiveness. But it requires organizational maturity to implement well. Not everyone wants to be in a support role forever, though many engineers actually prefer the stability and reduced pressure of these positions. (I have met more than one person that literally told me they “just want to show up and do their job”.) And for those who do aspire to move up, that’s where training and advancement comes in—this model can present opportunities for people to move into those superstar roles.

Option 2: Develop the Team

Another approach is to invest in moving that middle 50-60% up the curve. Can you turn your 3x developers into 5x or 6x developers? Better training, more effective process, and the right tools can all help. And right now, we’re in the middle of a massive experiment with AI-powered development tools. Will AI coding agents boost the productivity of average developers significantly? Early results suggest maybe, but it still remains to be seen.

As a leader, implementing this options means you have to be willing to expend the resources to actually commit to this type of improvement. Providing time and budget for training and tools, and putting the right people in charge of the processes (here’s a hint: pick someone who has ACTUALLY DONE IT as opposed to hiring an outside “process improvement expert”) can have enormous positive payoff.

Option 3: Allow People to Specialize or Cross-Train

Sometimes your middle performers aren’t actually middle performers—they’re just in the wrong role. That developer who struggles with frontend architecture might be exceptional at performance optimization. The person who’s mediocre at feature development might be outstanding at security or DevOps work.

As a leader, you can create opportunities for people to either specialize in areas where they excel, or cross-train into different roles to discover hidden strengths. This requires flexibility in your organizational structure and a willingness to let people explore. But the payoff can be significant when someone moves from being a 3x developer to an 8x site reliability engineer, or from a struggling backend developer to an excellent technical writer.

But for this to work you have to be willing to invest in people, which might mean finding them a better fit in your organization. But the payoff can be huge when someone moves from being a 3x developer to an 8x cloud ops engineer, or from a struggling backend developer to an excellent UI/UX designer.

Why “Just Lay Them Off” Isn’t Always the Answer

There’s a seductive option that appeals to Wall Street and executive boards: just lay off the middle performers and keep only your superstars. After all, if 10 people are doing 50% of the work, why not cut the other 40 people?

Here’s why this is shortsighted. First, the morale hit across your organization will be huge. Your remaining high performers will see what happened and start polishing their resumes, wondering if they’re next. Second, you’re creating massive brain drain—institutional knowledge, customer relationships, and organizational context all walk out the door. Third, and most importantly, you’re almost certainly measuring value incorrectly. That “small” percentage of work the middle performers do likely props up your high performers in ways you don’t see. Someone has to respond to customer support tickets, attend those status meetings, maintain the build pipeline, and update the documentation. When your 10x developer can focus on architecting the new system instead of debugging the deployment pipeline, that’s because someone else handled it.

Finding Your Answer

Look, the reality is most of your team is in that middle. They’re showing up, doing their jobs, and trying their best. Your challenge as a leader is finding the right approach for your specific organization and context. Maybe it’s the surgical team model for your most critical projects. Maybe it’s investing in tools and training to uplift everyone. Maybe it’s helping people find roles where they can truly excel. Or maybe it’s some combination of all three.

What it shouldn’t be is reaching for the layoff button because a spreadsheet says you could theoretically operate with fewer people. Sustainable organizations are built on recognizing and optimizing the contributions of the many, not just celebrating the few.