[arcanus]

Von Neumann and Einstein's contributions to humanity are incomparable to a 10x engineer. I don't think metrics such as productivity (which 10x crudely approximates) can begin to address this level of innovation. Both unquestionably drove paradigm shifts in scientific and mathematical thinking.

It's not measuring the same thing. A 10x engineer might be compared to a full tenured professor with a high citation count. Einstein and Neumann are luminaries of human thought.

[sinenomine]

> can begin to address this level of innovation.

... this level of innovation? Come on, there clearly is something more profound happening here:

> Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man"

> Seeing von Neumann's mind at work, Eugene Wigner wrote, "one had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch."

> Edward Teller admitted that he "never could keep up with him".[296] Teller also said "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."

Modern science has started to discern fundamental differences in neural architecture[1] and function[2] between very bright and moderately bright individuals. Surely there is a multitude of small differences, which, by virtue of adding up at the right side of the distribution's tail, bring forward a mind superior to ours.

1. https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/brains-o...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4052339/

[deltaonezero]

Yes they are at the top of their game, but you can certainly map differences from the top end of the spectrum to another part of the spectrum.

The difference between Von Neuman and a 10x engineer is vast. However the Delta between Einstien and Von neumann vs. the Delta between a 10x engineer and a regular engineer is a mappable concept.

You can do this with the "spectrum" of numbers too.

    |100010 - 1000000| = 10
    | 10 - 0 |         = 10

The delta is the same even though the first set of numbers is vastly larger then the second set. Maybe pretending those numbers are IQ points will help illustrate the concept better.

I would expect a 10x engineer to realize the above automatically without elaboration... jk.

[jollybean]

That's not the best way to describe it.

A 'Medical Researcher' can be less intelligent than a surgeon, but impact billions of lives.

A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time.

I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual.

A lot of crap startups, might have 10x engineers, but it may make no difference. Or 10x-ers caught up in Corporate Bureaucracy, same result.

So this whole mapping 'some project to revenues' really is something else, quite different. Maybe useful, but not in the context we are thinking here.

[arcanus]

> I think we should get away with the 'net impact' of 10x engineers because that's too contextual

Disagree. My experience is that 10x engineers ARE inherently contextual. When we are talking about the cream of the crop, this requires evaluating impact.

You need the opportunity to thrive, which can be deeply contextual. Luck is an element of life. Napoleon would have been nothing without the French revolution. Einstein was fortunate (but capitalized!) that no one had put together Minkowski distance with open questions from michelson-morley.

> A 'Brain Surgeon' can only do one surgery at a time

A brain surgeon can publish the results of a cutting edge surgery, which can save many more lives that a single hand wielding a scalpel. I don't think anyone here is arguing that surgeon's are evaluated on scalpel technique any more than we are comparing programmers by SLOC/day.