[TrackerFF]

Have you ever worked on large projects? I'm talking about projects which involve hundreds of people, thousands even, and those that stretch over many years.

In the grand scheme of things, the 10x-100x engineers work gets attenuated - think of it as some kind of averaging filter.

Do you think some 10x engineer carried the moon landing? or the Large Hadron Collider?

Sure, if you work on some dinky team single-digit number of workers, the contribution from the 10x engineer will be more apparent - but as the number of people involved increases, the more important the average is.

[silvestrov]

10x is not about the number of lines produced.

It is about programming languages and tools, about database design/schemas.

Choose the wrong language/tool for the job and the amount of work needed to solve the job easily expands 10x.

Guido van Rossum and James Gosling and Anders Hejlsberg likely have reduced the amount of work by 10x for a lot of projects compared to implementing them in a lower level programming language.

[TrackerFF]

10x is not literal - the origins is from the 60s, and stem from some study where the best engineer was found to be 10x more productive than the worst engineer.

Average, is of course relative to the sample. If some "elite" company only hires 10x engineers, there's likely not going to be any 10x engineers there. The most productive engineer will probably only be slightly more productive than the worst.

If some other company has zero standards for hiring, to a degree where you can basically pick anyone off the streets and put them to code, the best will probably Nx (where N is very large) more productive than the worst.

But even then, there are so many dimensions and aspects to this.

[whatnow37373]

Being 10x as productive then has more to do with your position than your skills.

The Roman emperor could make or break entire regions by vaguely wagging a few fingers. If and when he made a good decision - which could often easily be attributed to good luck - he could be, and was, heralded as the best thing since sliced bread because he saved millions. Such power surely must be divine. I don't think so.

Not saying Linus or Guido aren't competent engineers. I'm just saying that I don't think they are the sliced bread many make them out to be. They are good. Lots of people are good, but not many people get to be the first to create Python.

And, to be frank, Python - and its ecosystem - and me are through the honeymoon phase. Let's just say the chemistry has worn off and I'm not quite so sure Guido is the net positive we think he is. Maybe Python replaced some other upcoming far superior language. We can't know. (I suspect it did.)

In general I don't think individual/personality worship is a net positive on any axis.