I've never understood this argument. To me, it seems obvious that 10X programmers exist. How much faster would John Carmack produce a new graphics engine than

I've never understood this argument. To me, it seems obvious that 10X programmers exist. How much faster would John Carmack produce a new graphics engine than a recent bootcamp grad? How much better would Carmack's be? I know I've gone to unfair extremes with the question, but it still illustrates the point. Really excellent developers are waaay more productive. The upside is huge. All the time saved avoiding blind alleys based on experience, all the cases where experienced intuition identifies the cause of a bug that would have taken much longer, etc.