| Good question. In the first 20 results of searching HN for "the man behind"(https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22the%20man%20behind%22&sort=...): * The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller (wikipedia.org) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14989551 >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. * Never give up: The story of the man behind Tetris. (mixergy.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830679 > 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. |