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Notes -
If you started a company that could produce ten million dollars in goods, and nine other people did the same thing, but there was only room in the market for one company, it would be silly to say that one person produced 10 million and the other nine whose company failed are parasites. This should be counted as ten people producing 1 million each; if there's risk, everyone should get credit for the average amount, even if by luck some will produce more and some less.
Writing software for someone who doesn't do anything useful with it is similar. Making software, or anything that isn't a finished product, can in general be productive, yet any specific instance of it may lead to the end user producing a lot, or producing nothing at all. Which one you get depends on luck. So you should get credit for the amount of productivity that can be credited to developers like you, averaged over all possible customers, even if due to bad luck it so happens that your particular customer isn't producing anything.
(Of course, you have to be careful with reference classes. Maybe you're the only programmer who programs system X. That doesn't mean that since there's only one programmer, there's no average; you probably want to average among all programmers in some larger category.)
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