In some domains and markets they're probably a genuine myth.
Remember, for every Bellard, Carmack or jart: there's at least 100,000 glue engineers who are just trying to cash in some easy VC checks - can't blame them at all.
I don't know... As you imply, there's a lot of mediocrity among those 100,000+ glue engineers trying to cash-in. Being 10x faster/better/whatever than the average of that is nowhere near as challenging as being 10x compared to the average kernel contributor or systems programmer. Which makes being Bellard and Carmack even more impressive.
> Nope. I've never met anyone who can complete in a month what it takes an average coder a year to complete.
i've built in two weeks something that took another guy 5 years to not even quite finish. with better performance, reliability and extensibility across the board.
that's a factor of 130x (or more!). how do you want to divide that up between the two of us? if he's 0.01x, how rare must he be for the "average" to still be sitting at 1x?
In my time at Google, I saw numerous projects completed that a whole army of me could never complete (according to the required standards). There are many such problems where throwing more bodies at it won't help; genuine insight is necessary. I'm surprised you haven't encountered this.
I don't know. It was really made over a long, long time by a person working at it virtually full-time, I bet much more than 40h/week. I remember Terry posting LoseThos (or whatever it was called at before that) it in the OsDev forums in the early 2000s, and he had already been working at it for quite a while. Plus, at least back then, it was more of a novelty toy-like OS-simulacrum than a real OS. There were much more impressive projects at the OsDev forums at the time, with people running real app, connecting to the internet and talking to 3d cards.
Every competent and qualified engineer should be able to do the job of 10 competent and qualified engineers?
The statement that every engineer can be a 10x engineer is recursively paradoxical. If a 10x engineer existed, in my mind, he would immediately be able to identify this logical error.
You've really never met this person? Feels like more or less everyone with real expertise should be able to do this in the right job.