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John Carmack. Donald Knuth. Casey Muratori? Linus Torvalds. "There's no such thing as a 10x engineer" people probably haven't seen a normal distribution before

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Dudeman112 4y ago
  >people probably haven't seen a normal distribution before And yet there aren't 17 meters tall people (avg adult male height back home is 1.7m) Mind you, I consider the whole discussion stupid since it's an intellectual/creative job Every. Single. Instance. Of trying to measure such things has failed at producing consistent results or results with predictive capability. Talking about X times engineer makes no sense when you don't even know what a 1x engineer is.
• rsanek 4y ago
  Knowledge work is much closer to a power law distribution than a normal one. That is, there are indeed a handful of 10x engineers, but it's not a ton of 1x and some 0.1x. It's overwhelmingly 0.1x. This paper does a good job of showing just how dominant the 10x are in areas with unambiguous and legible outcomes (tenure of politicians, number of Emmy wins, etc.) http://www.hermanaguinis.com/PPsych2012.pdf http://www.hermanaguinis.com/PPsych2012.pdf