[azakai]

Well said. Without objective evidence, we should be open to the possibility of this being true or false.

However, as various people commented here, and I can attest as well, there are engineers who are orders of magnitude better than others. It's plainly obvious when you meet them and work with them for enough time to see.

So the interesting thing is why some people disbelieve their existence. If they haven't met such engineers, that is fine - they should be skeptical until they see evidence. But it is irrational for them to discount the eyewitness evidence of others.

So the really interesting issue here is why some people, like the article, want to deny the existence of such engineers. Are they threatened by them or something along those lines? I'm not sure.

(And of course "10x" is meaningless literally, etc. etc. But programming is a human activity, and we can measure our fellow humans despite how complex we are; for example we can say that some authors of fiction are hugely better than the average, such a thing is not even debatable.)