Sure, there are several famous examples that everyone is aware of.
Steve Jobs with the iPhone or iPod. Elon Musk with both SpaceX and Tesla. Jeff Bezos with AWS and Amazon's success generally.
In every thread (or media article) in which those people are given opulent credit for the thing in question, it's persistently pointed out that in fact the teams, designers, employees, engineers, leadership, etc. behind those things deserve enormous credit, while the famous person at the front is getting the credit as a visionary genius. Why? Because it sells better to put Bezos on the cover (with his head in a box).
State in an HN thread that Elon Musk founded Tesla sometime, see what response you get 100% of the time. I've been watching that specific response play out over and over for the better part of a decade here as one example. Musk persistently gets given overwhelming credit by the media, and he persistently gets torn down for it.
You also constantly see it when it comes to team efforts generally to take this further. For example when NASA and ESA work on something together and then NASA gets blanket credit. The more famous team will get the overwhelming credit, because it sells. That last part is what it's all about.
While I think it is important to recognize that Jobs/Musk/Bezos all had large organizations working on things they are often credited with, I think it is more reasonable to credit them in this way because they were explicitly the leaders and founders of their companies. They envisioned, created, and led the organizations that produced all those products.
I don't think that is an apples-to-apples comparison with this story. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a collaboration between numerous organizations (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope#Collab...) and it does have a leadership team (see https://eventhorizontelescope.org/organization). But in this story, we did not discuss the leaders of this effort. We discussed one contributing engineer/scientist who was elevated above the rest, when her algorithm was not even used in the production of the final image (which is the underlying scientific milestone that is being recognized here).
I find it bizarre because from all that I've seen, Bouman was not in a leadership position but was a peer-contributor alongside many others. Her contributions matter, and are important (as credited by Andrew Chael), but it is bizarre to recognize her alone and not everyone else who is on equal footing in terms of their contribution (or even greater footing, for those who came up with the algorithms that were used for the final image).
>Zen is the work of a huge team of talented engineers. To single one out as "the man behind Zen" seems very wrong. I don't know what Jim Keller's contribution to Zen was (and without a blog or autobiography or similar from someone well placed inside the team, then neither do most commentators), but if he did work on the Zen architecture, it's hard to believe that he would have accomplished much without the help of a good team. Keller is the main AMD engineer singled out for praise on The Internet, while the hard work (and given that Zen is such a success, it's surely the result of a mountain of hard work) of everyone else is mostly ignored.
> This story is not about "the man behind Tetris" and I am dubious of several of the claims made.
>"Henk didn't invent Tetris, but he's the entrepreneur who went into the Soviet Union to win the rights to the game, and he's the man who made it a world-wide phenomenon"
>The three statements above are true, dubious and false in that order.
Granted, that's only 2 out of 20. Other posts:
* a few generally critical (e.g., The Man Behind Windows Powershell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250349), so there wasn't any esteem to be divvied up,
* many projects that realistically wouldn't have existed but for the work or leadership of one man (e.g., Kim Peek with Mega, Dread Pirate Roberts with the Silk Road, Christopher Steele with the Steele Dossier), and
* many projects where I'm not familiar enough with the subject matter to say if the man was a "but for" influence (e.g., Brad Cox and Objective C).
Also interesting are the results for searching "the woman behind" (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20woman%20behind%22&sor...). Everything after the first three results has either no comments or only one. The discussion on the first three are positive to very positive though.
On the specific question of how much credit Bouman deserves, without being intimately familiar with the project, I'd guess that Bouman herself gets it right: "No one of us could've done it alone. It came together because of lots of different people from many backgrounds." (https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/10/us/katie-bouman-mit-black-hol...). I personally find her an intelligent and likable ambassador for her team.
Steve Jobs with the iPhone or iPod. Elon Musk with both SpaceX and Tesla. Jeff Bezos with AWS and Amazon's success generally.
In every thread (or media article) in which those people are given opulent credit for the thing in question, it's persistently pointed out that in fact the teams, designers, employees, engineers, leadership, etc. behind those things deserve enormous credit, while the famous person at the front is getting the credit as a visionary genius. Why? Because it sells better to put Bezos on the cover (with his head in a box).
State in an HN thread that Elon Musk founded Tesla sometime, see what response you get 100% of the time. I've been watching that specific response play out over and over for the better part of a decade here as one example. Musk persistently gets given overwhelming credit by the media, and he persistently gets torn down for it.
You also constantly see it when it comes to team efforts generally to take this further. For example when NASA and ESA work on something together and then NASA gets blanket credit. The more famous team will get the overwhelming credit, because it sells. That last part is what it's all about.