That is probably true. But we shouldn’t forget that these people can do these things often because they are supported by a large number of people who do the mundane tasks that need to be done.
The keyword "impactful engineering" needs some clarification though.
It does not mean there's a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off.
A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually become the company's flagship product. That's impact. However, the thing needs to be rewritten from scratch to become production ready or even deployable, and that takes far more work that does not fit the definition of "impactful".
I personally know a principal engineer of a FANG which single-handedly wrote the proof of concepts of more than a few projects that thousands of users use every single day. From his own words following one of his recent presentations, "this needs to be rewritten from scratch as this would get me rejected from our job interviews".
A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relatively rare.
(I mean political in the purest, non-controversial sense, i.e. the communication skills to answer objections and acquire group consensus on the required change.)
Meta-meta-question: assuming that it does, how does the line get described (let alone drawn) dividing "this work contributes to identifying the 1%" from "this is a waste of time"?
(Insert something about gradient descent and local vs global maximums here)
I'll call this a genuine question, I could definitely use some refinement of my own optimization of this problem space (and not wind up in micro-optimized dead ends etc).
If the payoff in the 1% case is high enough, then you don't have to know beforehand! Just do all 100 changes and the one winner pays for all the rest.
It's all a numbers game. The median member of your kernel team, the median fire extinguisher, the median link to a sales web page, the median joist in a floor, all will do nothing of note. But if you distribute the resources properly they will hopefully be where they are needed to generate a positive ROI that pays for the overall system. If you zoom in too much or too little it all looks silly.
You need a bench. Some of the brilliant folks who are great at pushing through problems are awful and maintenance and sustainment. I worked for a bit in a SWAT engineering team tasked with addressing crisis problems or emergency response. If you don’t have people you’re developing on the bench, you won’t be able to respond to those types of things and will get bogged down with tech debt.
I was a faux “10x” person because I had license to break the rules to get shit done - because the value of what we were doing was higher than the cost of cleaning up the mess. (Not because of any brilliance on my or the teams part) We did two years worth of work in a month, but it’s still being refactored 3 years later.
