[nullsense]

Engineering talent likely falls on some sort of distribution like most everything else in the universe.

Whether it's normally distributed or not I don't know. Some of the variables that underpin engineering skill are independent, but software careers have a tonne of path dependence where the types of software and problems you work on feed into the types of software and problems that you get to work on in future and that has a big impact on your skills and that particular variable isn't independent.

I still work with the assumption that the distribution is normal just cos it's easy to conceptualize. So maybe it makes more sense to think about the 2, 3 and 4 sigma engineers than the "10x" engineer.