This comment is spot on. I would add that it's not only 1 super smart person, or only 2 people per team, it's a power law. 1 person does the most, a few people do almost as much, then you start getting out into the tail of "normal" people. You can try to hard partition the tail and create an 80/20 rule, but it's fundamentally continuous, and the shape parameter will be different for each organization.
Understanding this distribution of productivity is a great litmus test for a manager. If they say the distribution of productivity is shaped much differently than this, that is a red flag. They probably can't tell who is contributing, and you can't trust them to do the basic functions of hire, retain, fire.
The article reads like it was written by a manager with tunnel vision. A manager's value-add comes from making a bunch of "normal" people productive, while staying out of the way of the few engineers who will deliver >50% of the value anyways. If you only focus on making the normal people productive, you are only doing the additive part of your job, and neglecting the negative part, which is to recognize and not interfere with the high performers. I would imagine this guy goes around creating lots of least-common-denominator systems/processes, which drive away talent and make the high performers less productive.
IME people who say this in the workplace tend to overestimate the importance of one aspect (usually the product development itself) and ignore the importance of things like taking a product to manufacturing, getting technical costing under control, or adapting to user needs. There's a lot of fluff in the article, but this part in the conclusion and your statements about "A people hiring A people" or the example of Linus' place in the kernel all align:
> It’s a competitive advantage to build an environment where people can be hired for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses; where the emphasis is on composing teams
There's plenty of otherwise "10x" programmers who go outside of their strengths and suffer for it.
Understanding this distribution of productivity is a great litmus test for a manager. If they say the distribution of productivity is shaped much differently than this, that is a red flag. They probably can't tell who is contributing, and you can't trust them to do the basic functions of hire, retain, fire.
The article reads like it was written by a manager with tunnel vision. A manager's value-add comes from making a bunch of "normal" people productive, while staying out of the way of the few engineers who will deliver >50% of the value anyways. If you only focus on making the normal people productive, you are only doing the additive part of your job, and neglecting the negative part, which is to recognize and not interfere with the high performers. I would imagine this guy goes around creating lots of least-common-denominator systems/processes, which drive away talent and make the high performers less productive.