[Avshalom]

Their contribution was necessary, I mean it's utterly facile but: you weren't gonna get a degree from a university if the university doesn't exist. There's a billion or so people in addition to them and a few billion more that got us to this point.

It's not that there is no such thing as individual achievement it's that there is no "small minority" skilled or unskilled that the modern economy can be reduced to.

[jp555]

Sure as a whole, on average.

But there absolutely is a small minority of extreme producers in most domains.

[unionpivo]

If you take out truck drivers and train operators, most modern cities die in a few weeks.

If every star programmer/engineer died, a lot of things would stop working, but people would at least live long enough to maybe deal with it.

[kjsbfkjbf]

Especially considering many start programmers and engineers seemingly exist to increase revenue of complete luxury services like Netflix.