"Superhuman" hyperbole aside, some people are demonstrably orders of magnitude more productive than others, and that's true for almost any field of work (depend

"Superhuman" hyperbole aside, some people are demonstrably orders of magnitude more productive than others, and that's true for almost any field of work (depending on your metric, of course - but that's true for some of the metrics that actually matter to most people), and programming is no different. Arthur Whitney, Fabrice Bellard, Linus Torvalds, Mike Pall are well known examples. It obviously requires a lot of skill, and I agree with [0] that it also requires the skill to be selective - some problems require a lot of work for which there are no "better ways". E.g. Mike Pall, alone and in short time, produced a JIT that runs way faster than V8 (which probably already had 100x more man-months[1] of really really smart people at that point). This amazing feat is a result of Pall's amazing talent - but it was only possible (IIRC, he said so himself), because Lua, although it is essentially as dynamic as JavaScript, made a few choices that made it much more amenable to effective JITting. [0] https://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html https://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html [1] I use it properly here as a unit of effort/cost, not as a unit of productivity.