My main frustration with the person I was responding to is that a lot of the terms we are arguing about are ill-defined, and yet he's arguing them with a lot of vigor.
There is also a time dimension to software. I have been on some occasions the only developer of pieces software that were tackling hairy problems that teams of "normal" developers would avoid. I always wanted to solve those problems in a way that would make everyone's life easier. To do that I had to spend a ton of deep focus time on modeling the problems effectively, and if I was successful, people who were put off by the problem space would come and contribute, because they found the model amenable. Or they thought it'd benefit them to be a part of a project that's picking up steam. A lot of these people would fix small issues here and there, but some of them actually donated a lot of focus and helped take these projects to new levels. The ones making the deep changes always cared deeply about the problem space, or brought a lot of knowledge from another subset of cs, and I wouldn't call them "normal". I think it is a disservice to the sacrifices they made to do what nobody else felt like doing and throw a blanket statement like "teams of mundane contributors do the really important work".
This is not a dig at "normal" devs - I have been the "normal" dev on many projects, but because of my experiences I try to give credit where credit is due.
I also detest the 10x thing exactly for the reasons you pointed out.
There is also a time dimension to software. I have been on some occasions the only developer of pieces software that were tackling hairy problems that teams of "normal" developers would avoid. I always wanted to solve those problems in a way that would make everyone's life easier. To do that I had to spend a ton of deep focus time on modeling the problems effectively, and if I was successful, people who were put off by the problem space would come and contribute, because they found the model amenable. Or they thought it'd benefit them to be a part of a project that's picking up steam. A lot of these people would fix small issues here and there, but some of them actually donated a lot of focus and helped take these projects to new levels. The ones making the deep changes always cared deeply about the problem space, or brought a lot of knowledge from another subset of cs, and I wouldn't call them "normal". I think it is a disservice to the sacrifices they made to do what nobody else felt like doing and throw a blanket statement like "teams of mundane contributors do the really important work".
This is not a dig at "normal" devs - I have been the "normal" dev on many projects, but because of my experiences I try to give credit where credit is due.
I also detest the 10x thing exactly for the reasons you pointed out.