[fivea]

> Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.

The keyword "impactful engineering" needs some clarification though.

It does not mean there's a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off.

A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually become the company's flagship product. That's impact. However, the thing needs to be rewritten from scratch to become production ready or even deployable, and that takes far more work that does not fit the definition of "impactful".

I personally know a principal engineer of a FANG which single-handedly wrote the proof of concepts of more than a few projects that thousands of users use every single day. From his own words following one of his recent presentations, "this needs to be rewritten from scratch as this would get me rejected from our job interviews".

[nthj]

The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient.

A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relatively rare.

(I mean political in the purest, non-controversial sense, i.e. the communication skills to answer objections and acquire group consensus on the required change.)

[actually_a_dog]

I disagree for the following reason: without the proof of concept, the change in production would probably never come about. You can't really separate the impact of the proof of concept from that of the production change because they don't exist independently.