Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman were 10x physicists. Then there are probably a couple more 9x physicists, many of them with Nobel prizes under their belt. A

Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman were 10x physicists. Then there are probably a couple more 9x physicists, many of them with Nobel prizes under their belt. A lot more 5x physicists. A whole mass of 2x physicists. Another whole mass of 0.5x physicists. I don't think anyone wants to seriously dispute that there's a bell curve of aptitude in pretty much any human endeavor, whether that aptitude came naturally or was nurtured due to hard work or both. But the 10x gospel we see in software engineering is an entirely different beast: the claim is that there's a small group of people who "really get it" and that everyone else "just isn't made of the right stuff". It assumes both a kind of determinism (you do not become good, you either are good or you're not) and a hard dichotomy (there's no ordinary engineers, just bad ones and great ones). Of course management would prefer to make ordinary engineers better than to let a couple of brilliant minds work their magic. But that's just common sense: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Men https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Me...