[johnsmith1840]

You can but not the way you're saying.

Once was part of a team where a mid level guy spent a year building/heavy maintenance of some catastrophe of a solution. They literally had the end users copy and pasting hundreds of commands from a generated excel sheet of a command per core (shudders). I spent ~2wks on a different architecture that was a massive improvement we abandoned their code base. He quit like 4 months later to join some faang. Granted that 2wks of work was on top of a distributed cloud infra that took me 6 months to build.

So yes, a skilled dev might skip entire months of work someone else would make.

What you seem to be describing is a companies skilled engineer designs something and passes down the spec. The guy making the spec is the 10x guy. For large projects it's even more pronounced. The article literally described someone who wasn't skilled they simply knew how to smooze the MBA's and a company with poor engineering leadership.