I don't think software is all that exceptional in this regard. Any profession has certain visible achievements that distinguish its world-class members. For sof

I don't think software is all that exceptional in this regard. Any profession has certain visible achievements that distinguish its world-class members. For software, it's cool open source projects; for chefs, it's creating a great restaurant; for doctors, it's publishing influential novel research. In each of these fields, the visible achievement isn't exactly the same as great performance in the field. You can get unlucky in scientific research and end up with nothing publishable; you can cook mediocre food but market it really well; or you can create the latest trendy build system instead of just mastering Gnu Make. The misleading thing may be the assumption that most successful open source software projects are done by unpaid hackers on their own time. Perhaps that used to be the case, but many of the hot open source projects in recent history -- from Rails to Docker to React to Swift -- are built on the clock by successful programmers employed at big and small companies. But software is unusual in that serious contributions can be made by people without any institutional support.