Jeff Dean was 10x when he wrote EPI INFO, he was 10x when he worked on profilers at DEC WRL, he was 10x when he and Sanjay Ghemawat wrote MapReduce, and he was 10x when they rewrote Google's search indexer. Maybe 1000x or 10000x, really. It's true that part of that was that he worked on things that mattered instead of things that didn't, and he could have found himself in a situation where he didn't have that opportunity. But it's clearly not just productivity in a single domain, and it's not because someone else was fixing all his bugs.

This is just a redressing of the same “everyone is just as good” bullshit. Some people get a fuckload more work done because they go down the right design paths to start with, know how to work effectively, know what pieces to skip, etc.

The same is true in nearly every field. Programming is not special.

I think people also don't realize that high-performers weren't always high-performers. They had to hone their skills, usually by doing years of the right kind of challenging work with modest rewards, and sometimes they can be formed by exceptional mentoring.

But however they got there it took time, it's something that can be cultivated as long as folks aren't treated as fungible.

Well, he became 10x in the domain, and the other did not become 10x, it's not like he was born with this knowledge, he just took it more seriously and went deeper

No, some people are a lot more productive across broad range of tasks. Often they are assigned tougher/critical stuff though because it doesn't make sense them do trivial tweaks.

Ensuring people work on what they are comparatively best at is a feature. 1x engineers would also get a lot less done if they had to clean the toilets and sweep the floor and many of the other low end tasks others do, instead they assign people who cost less to those tasks.

How do you expect the world to know about the others? The CEO is public facing by definition of their duties and the charter. Any other public presense from the organization technically falls under marketing of some sort, even teaching useful generic skills for free (say a publisher promoting literacy in third world nations) is in service of this.

It requires looking into arcane details to know about the engineers behind it. I mean software, especially media productions often include outright credits but few would remember any but leads usually. Precise attribution would get downright absurd in a pure data sense to give coverage that few care about. Say for just a simple who tightened the screw on this part of the cloth mill during its production run, who made the screw, who farmed the cotton, made the irrigation means....

Replicability and productivity atr what leads to technical obscurity ironically - because the automation and scale means fewer people are even in the position to know what to even ask about the details relative to the numbers served. Thus the knowledge remains arcane. Not many people would even know say, that DRAM tries to minimize capacitance and inductance but it needs some of both to function. Let alone who was involved with what subsection of the chip design and design testing process.

There are other ways to be known.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2021/04/27/allen-man-w...