[fsloth]

Actually in programming single individuals do make the greatest impact.

I'm good at what I do but my work would have far less impact unless it was done in collaboration with the few people in our org whose contributions are astoundingly good.

You need lots of peoples, sure. But, at the same time, the outocome of a project actually may depend on the knowhow, skill and diligence of an individual developer. Their output is prodigious, quality sky high, and in this manner they function not only as an individual contributor, but also in a way as a productivity multiplier for everyone they collaborate with, as the standard they set keeps everyone else also striving high.

You are correct, in a way - non-collaborating individual contributors are kind of waste and not needed in most cases. But collaborating individual contributors with high standards and high output? You really, really want to work with those.

[amznthrowaway5]

In many complex domains like ML, I find most people don't contribute anything and actively make the problem worse. You often don't need the amount of people that large companies often hire, it's just empire building. Software engineers aren't replaceable cogs.