Yes - Dr Norvig is exactly the type of expert I would often engage to figure out difficult problems. Ask him how to configure a Nomad cluster and he would likely say "What is a Nomad cluster do?"
Writing and debugging production code is a different skill set. Finding the optimal algorithm is useful but not the same as releasing it into the wild which may require maintaining backwards compatibility, work arounds for bugs in other code or hardware bugs that can no longer be fixed at the foundry - the list goes on.
The vast majority of work programmers do 10X or otherwise is not greenfield where you get to pick the programming language you have 10K hours of experience using, the best hardware or an unlimited budget of money and time.
Now I would consider Dr Norvig a 10X educator. That program demonstrates how a decent knowledge of algorithms and math can take a relatively complex problem and make it tractable.
Just because he's brilliant at writing green field code to solve problems like this one, doesn't imply he's incapable of producing production code when required.
Never meant to imply that he could not. He is a far more accomplished programmer than myself. Simply pointing out that he is an expert and his skill set is unique and in someways quite specialized. He may be considered 10X in his domain - maybe not so much outside of it. Programmer/Software Engineer are broad terms.
Writing and debugging production code is a different skill set. Finding the optimal algorithm is useful but not the same as releasing it into the wild which may require maintaining backwards compatibility, work arounds for bugs in other code or hardware bugs that can no longer be fixed at the foundry - the list goes on.
The vast majority of work programmers do 10X or otherwise is not greenfield where you get to pick the programming language you have 10K hours of experience using, the best hardware or an unlimited budget of money and time.
Now I would consider Dr Norvig a 10X educator. That program demonstrates how a decent knowledge of algorithms and math can take a relatively complex problem and make it tractable.