Comment by epolanski

Comment by epolanski 21 hours ago

Of course there is.

There's always individuals, developers or not, whose impact is 50 times greater than the average.

And the impact is measured financially, meaning, how much money you make.

If I find a way to solve an issue in a warehouse sparing the company from having to hire 70 people (that's not a made up number but a real example I've seen), your impact is in the multiple millions, the guy being tasked with delivering tables from some backoffice in the same company is obviously returning fractions of the same productivity.

Salvatore Sanfilippo, the author of Redis, alone, built a database that killed companies with hundreds of (brilliant) engineers.

Approaching the problems differently allowed him to scale to levels that huge teams could not, and the impact on $ was enormous.

Not only that but you can have negative x engineers. Those that create plenty of work, gaslighting and creating issues and slowing entire teams and organizations.

If you don't believe in NX developers or individuals that's a you problem, they exist in sports or any other field where single individuals can have impact hundreds of thousands or millions of times more positive than the average one.

rester324 21 hours ago

I asked if you can prove there are 10x or 50x programmers. You shared anecdotes and theories. I will rather wait until you share some evidence.

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epolanski 21 hours ago

If you don't see the evidence of different individuals having very different productivity in every field, including software, (measured in $/hr like every economist does btw) that's a you problem.
Of course different scientists with different backgrounds, professionalism, communication and leadership skills are going to have magnitude of orders different outputs and impacts in AI companies.
If you put me and Carmack in a game development team you can rest assured that he's going to have a 50/100x impact over me, not sure why would I even question it.
Not only his output will be vastly superior than mine, but his design choices, leadership and experience will save and compound infinite amounts of money and time. That's beyond obvious.

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