[exue]

Paints a great+balanced high-level picture picture of the phenomena - I noticed it was submitted a few weeks ago without much attention. I'd also add reading about TopCoder and IOI / various competitions - star performers in another, highly measurable, field. Sometimes, absolute skill differences at the top may be small but in a competition environment lead to huge result disparities in wins/losses (see sports or eSports - every small advantage matters). Though mosts aspects of engineering aren't highly competitive, I'd argue similar features such as need for creativity or logically difficult problems, produce the power-law-like distribution.

Rereading the Medium piece now draws me to its relative lack of citation especially in the moral arguments toward the end, with a lot of judgments on a shaky empirical ground.