[mrisoli]

Assuming you can objectively measure someone like this, either by LoC or delivery times, this is the wrong way to approach any project.

Having a 10x engineer(or even worse, a 500x engineer in this alleged case) is a huge risk for the company, should the engineer want to leave or if they are incapacitated in a tragic event, the company is severely handicapped, ideally a so-called 500x engineer should spend less time writing the actual code and instead mentoring/managing others to scale up their knowledge, should the company do this right, they might not deliver on time, but they'll have a much wider array of experts when something breaks or for the next projects, reduces overall company risk and it's more profitable in the long run.

[ncmncm]

Yet, they in fact delivered and got paid, and (pay attention!) would not have delivered and not got paid, otherwise. Risk is speculation about the future. Here we have full benefit of hindsight, and the choice taken was manifestly correct, despite all counterfactual speculation.