[handwarmers]

The big question is, can we find counterexamples to your model of reality in actual reality. And if we can easily do that, what does your apparent over-confidence about your statement say about you?

E.g. https://bellard.org/

To add to the insult, I'd challenge you to think of how many "great teams" of "normal" engineers, whatever any of these terms means, could pull off most of these projects in any amount of time.

Great professionals exist. They produce great work that is tough to reproduce. Your "helping" them does not mean they couldn't have done it without you.

[alienthrowaway]

Fabrice Bellard is not a counterexample you think he is. He is brilliant, but he doesn't stick around the projects he starts off. Someone has to triage bugs, setup CI, tag releases, keep the website running and all the other boring stuff.

I have contributed to one of the projects he originally authored, and my mundane contributions along with other volunteers not as brilliant as him have ensured the continued success of the project. I'm with gp: teams ship software, not individuals. Individuals may ship bug-fixes or largish features, but for software in the large, that is the realm of teams.

I've been there & done that: I've been the person that crunches and turns around impossible situations, and I have also spent months cleaning up after a 10x engineer who shipped a feature in "record time" that made the company lots of money but caused countless support calls and bugfixes for months on end until it stabilized. Many so-called 10x aren't, and rely a lot on a supporting cast of regulars to enable their "outstanding" work

[handwarmers]

My main frustration with the person I was responding to is that a lot of the terms we are arguing about are ill-defined, and yet he's arguing them with a lot of vigor.

There is also a time dimension to software. I have been on some occasions the only developer of pieces software that were tackling hairy problems that teams of "normal" developers would avoid. I always wanted to solve those problems in a way that would make everyone's life easier. To do that I had to spend a ton of deep focus time on modeling the problems effectively, and if I was successful, people who were put off by the problem space would come and contribute, because they found the model amenable. Or they thought it'd benefit them to be a part of a project that's picking up steam. A lot of these people would fix small issues here and there, but some of them actually donated a lot of focus and helped take these projects to new levels. The ones making the deep changes always cared deeply about the problem space, or brought a lot of knowledge from another subset of cs, and I wouldn't call them "normal". I think it is a disservice to the sacrifices they made to do what nobody else felt like doing and throw a blanket statement like "teams of mundane contributors do the really important work".

This is not a dig at "normal" devs - I have been the "normal" dev on many projects, but because of my experiences I try to give credit where credit is due.

I also detest the 10x thing exactly for the reasons you pointed out.