I’m not sure I see a difference between this 10x engineer and somebody who had a good idea. Having a good idea isn’t a skill. You can try to cultivate good ide

I’m not sure I see a difference between this 10x engineer and somebody who had a good idea. Having a good idea isn’t a skill. You can try to cultivate good ideas. But it’s not like we’re going to see the 100m dash of good ideas. Most of them only turn out to be good ideas in hindsight. A good number of times you might be sitting on a good idea and everyone around you will be telling you what a bad idea it is. Only time tells. Take the Infocom example from the article. Who knew, at the time, that Z-Machine was going to be a good idea? Did Berez and Blank have a crystal ball that could see the future of the company? They might have only been able to develop the Z-Machine because the company was only a handful of people and they didn't need to work too hard to convince anyone. It wasn't a big company. How does that make any of them 10x more productive than "regular" programmers? With what few empirical studies we have it doesn’t seem likely that there are, “some who are simply gifted.”