Isn't it obvious that the myth or reality of the 10x engineer has a lot to do with what the engineer is supposed to do?
Say that the engineer has to independently develop the general theory of relativity to solve a problem, then I'd say Einstein would have been about Inf times more productive than the average engineer at solving that particular problem.
If on the other hand it's the usual "migrate this crap code from that crap platform to this shiny new golden one" kind of work, then you'd have more of a bottleneck in how fast you can push the buttons on the keyboard...
You can't talk about productivity without defining the task, and software engineering is a field with extraordinary span in the difficulty of tasks.
Say that the engineer has to independently develop the general theory of relativity to solve a problem, then I'd say Einstein would have been about Inf times more productive than the average engineer at solving that particular problem.
If on the other hand it's the usual "migrate this crap code from that crap platform to this shiny new golden one" kind of work, then you'd have more of a bottleneck in how fast you can push the buttons on the keyboard...
You can't talk about productivity without defining the task, and software engineering is a field with extraordinary span in the difficulty of tasks.