[pjc50]

More people should be aware of Comrade Stakhanov, the "10x miner": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov

> In 1988, the Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed that the widely cited achievements of Stakhanov were puffery. The paper insisted that Stakhanov had used a number of helpers on support works, while the throughout was tallied for him alone. Still, according to the newspaper, Stakhanov's approach had eventually led to increased productivity by means of a better work organization, including specialization and task sequencing

Exactly the same discussion, except there it was tonnes of coal which can be easily and unambiguously measured. But they can't be easily attributed. How much of his work was really that of his team? And how much of it was simply inflation by his managers for propaganda purposes? And how much of it was, underneath all the propaganda, real process improvements?

[CRConrad]

TAN: I fearst heard of "Stachanovism" over forty years ago, in my teens. Some time before that I had read an anthology of American folk tales, so to me Comrade Alexei Grigorijevitj was always kind of a Soviet version of John Henry. Made it easier, when I later found out, to accept that Stachanov was also at least in part a myth...

[cutemonster]

Yes attribution can be hard.

At the same time, if one compares shoveling coal and laying bricks with software, then it'd be good to smash and destroy bricks, throw the coal back into the mine, raze houses. (Reducing the amount of code)

Software would be more comparable to designing the coal mining site, or architecturing a city (but not building it). And then maybe it's simpler to see, that individuals sometimes can have much impact.