[hintymad]

> Many people have been skeptical of the idea of the 10X engineer. O

Nah, of course 10x engineers exist. A 10X engineer saw that hundreds of engineers were writing MPI code to process data and struggled with error handling and therefore came up with a map-reduce framework and its underlying infra. The same infra also helped bootstrap a whole industry. In this case, we are talking about 10^6X engineer. Another 10X engineer got fed up with MapReduce's abstraction and decided to borrow more concepts from functional programming and also invented a little data structure called RDD. This is a 10^5X engineer. A 10X engineer saw that his org build ad-hoc solutions to provision hardware and therefore decided to build an abstraction layer called EC2. Oops! That's another 10^6X engineer. A 10X engineer was not happy that writing GPGPU code was slow and error prone so he decided to worked out a library called CUDA. That's another 10^4X engineer, no? A 10X engineer was fed up with people implementing all kinds of broken consensus protocol and coded out a little practical implementation of Paxos called Chubby. All of a sudden the world of engineers woke up to the idea that consensus can be centrally managed and can be robust. That's a 10^4X engineer, right? A 10X engineer hates that his org write ad-hoc and crappy code on Zookeeper, so he packaged his wisdom into a little library called Curator with two clean concepts: framework and Recipes, and thousands of engineers' life just got immensely better. That's at least a 10^3X engineer, right? A 10X engineer was not sure why it takes an artist years to write quality compilers, be it frontend or backend, so he decided to come up with this little framework called llvm. That's a 10^5X engineer, right? Oh man, I think I can write a book about the examples...

[arcade79]

Look up Jeff Dean:

https://research.google/people/jeff/

[boppo1]

Were each of these really achievements by a single engineer, or a team? One guy wrote CUDA?

[hintymad]

Ian Buck wrote the initial version, right? I'm sure multiple teams polished the aforementioned software. It's just that it was this one or two engineers came up with the idea, built the the first working version that the other fellow engineers thought impossible or too expensive or unworthy to build, and the rest was the history.

[heavenlyblue]

> that the other fellow engineers thought impossible or too expensive or unworthy to build

This is not an exhaustive list and you have just picked the points that support your weak argument.

[hintymad]

I thought $\exists$ does not require an exhaustive list, but $\forall$ does.

[frankchn]

The initial version of MapReduce was conceptualized and implemented by two people (Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat). Those were the only names that appeared on the paper: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...