Yeah, I've inherited a mess of software written by one of those before. I used to have some imposter syndrome because I wasn't that hyper productive, but not a

Yeah, I've inherited a mess of software written by one of those before. I used to have some imposter syndrome because I wasn't that hyper productive, but not after having to clean that code up. For example, I found a supposedly queue-less parallel map / threadpool with 2 or 3 queues inside of it, which had weird deadlock bugs that would result in strange occasional timeouts. I replaced it with a parallel map with no queues built on top of a thin and standardized threading library. The deadlocks went away. The resulting code was pretty boring in readable. I never bothered to dig into why the old code deadlocked, but throwing it all away fixed all the problems. It is a lot easier to greenfield where you can put off the edge conditions till later and focus entirely on the first 80%, it is also really easy to greenfield when you focus on just typing as fast as you can and spray sloppy code everywhere (actually sloppy code like that crazy parallel map implementation I threw away). I suspect the latter is what a lot of "10x developers" actually are.