> it used to be the case in hardware I think it's fair to say that Woz was a 50:1 or 100:1 guy. Jobs isn't saying A players are as common as straight-A studen

> it used to be the case in hardware I think it's fair to say that Woz was a 50:1 or 100:1 guy. Jobs isn't saying A players are as common as straight-A students (it comes across that they are extraordinarily rare; it takes "incredible work" to find them), it's just that (as he plainly states), unlike in most other fields, instead of performing 30% better or twice as well, they can do x50 or x100 times as well. Perhaps better examples are fields where output scales easily: e.g. one novelist can sell many more books than another. This performance is not related to not how quickly they type, but what they type. It reflects the old idea of "I'm sorry to write you such a long letter, I didn't have time to write a shorter one". The hard bit is in asking the right question, seeing the problem in the right way, redefining the problem - then, solving it is (comparatively) easy. It's about understanding what the problem actually is. Then, things can become radically simpler. Any sufficiently advanced understanding, if implemented as a technology, is indistinguishable from magic. Programming dramatically rewards such understanding, because understanding can be realized so easily implemented in a working technology (i.e. a program).