[rvnx]

I think you are mixing up art, technical skills and productivity.

Put Terry Davis (again him) as senior manager at Apple, and see the result.

From my point of view, Terry has the same level and approaches as Fabrice.

It does not guarantee at all that he is going to be more productive than 100 engineers as you directly claim.

It makes them good in what they like to do (writing obfuscated or low-level code, or implementing from scratch from specifications) as art or creativity.

[petermcd]

Thank you for introducing me to Terry Davis. I'm going to read more about him.

I am definitely not talking about art.

When I refer to 100x engineer, I'm referring to the impact that QEMU and FFmpeg have had on the world. I would be surprised if anyone who is familiar with these two projects would disagree that they have been highly impactful.

[rvnx]

Absolutely agreeing with you. I rather meant that scaling teams and being a great dev are not always going together (the same way that startup folks are often not the same type of people as managers in large companies), but in terms of technical impact I totally agree.

EDIT: Fair enough, I think he would be very productive due to useful contributions, at the end I agree with you.