Agreed. I think about Eli Goldratt's The Goal all the time. Paraphrasing: A team (system) is only as fast as its slowest member (task); to speed up the team,

Agreed. I think about Eli Goldratt's The Goal all the time. Paraphrasing: A team (system) is only as fast as its slowest member (task); to speed up the team, focus on making the bottle neck faster. Said another way, Goldratt also explains how a process that outpaces the others works to slow down the system overall. Local optimization leads to gloal inoptimization. Pretty basic queue theory stuff. This aspect is aka Theory of Constraints. Anyhoo. I don't buy most "10x programmer" tales. I just wonder who's on the receiving end of such awesomeness. And at what cost.