Software engineering research is very tough, because despite the formal name, it's a social science, and no two projects are the same. Civil engineering holds

Software engineering research is very tough, because despite the formal name, it's a social science, and no two projects are the same. Civil engineering holds up to physics and repeatable tests. No two software projects are the same. They have different teams, training, management structures, technical environments... Similar to psychology, it is very hard to draw rigorous conclusions for the real world, and most lab tests are of oversimplified situations. I also get Citogenesis. This also gets abused in many fields. Think Cargo Cults, and stories of performance improving every time the lights go on and off, and how we're all evil because people in lab tests electrocute their test subjects. That said, it is hard for anyone who has been in the world for a while to disbelieve the 10x programmers. We all have met them. They really are that much better. And they really can solve problems that others can't. They may not be better for every situation (Example: Following a structured testing methodology that requires a lot of human input) but they do exist. It would take a lot of evidence to prove that they DON'T.