Maybe you attract those like flies are attracted to honey, but pointing out that an Einstein existed isn't really helpful for approximately all teams of physicists out there, minus one or two teams
I'm not even saying there isn't a huge quality variance in the regular pool of programmers, mind you. Just that pointing out the existence of bad motherfuckers in a population of a few million people shouldn't come as a surprise.
It should come as even more of a surprise to find "Jeff Dean" people who were 2 kilometers tall, or who weighed 100 tonnes, or who could run 10,000 km per hour, or who lived 70,000 years, or who could shovel 60,000 tonnes of coal in a day.
Your comments about how physicists do physics are equally wrongheaded. Physics isn't any more a matter of shoveling coal than programming is, probably less so.
>It should come as even more of a surprise to find "Jeff Dean"
To find them, yes. To point out that they exist and the likely that you'll work with them is statistically insignificant? No.
The thing with intellectual labour is that some insights have immeasurable value. Some statistical outliers have such humongous intellectual capabilities that it's ridiculous how often they'll have great insights.
Of course, that won't stop people from trying to attach some numbers to it, even if their numbers are epistemologically shit.
People feel the need to chat about 10x developers when they don't even agree what a 1x developer is, and when they do present a definition, that definition is a function of (company, team, project, existing code base) which means there are more possible instances of 1x developers than the amount of developers who have ever lived.
Everyone is better off if they just ditch the "10x" which has connotations that programming nerds will latch on to and just use "highly performant dudes".
Jeff Dean is probably legitimately an outlier, though.
The same is true in nearly every field. Programming is not special.
The 10x programmer is real. The 5x salesperson is real. The 20x manager is real.
But however they got there it took time, it's something that can be cultivated as long as folks aren't treated as fungible.
Experience is important and adds up, honing the skills makes everyone better, but it's orthogonal to this issue; there are people that will very quickly outperform someone who has honed their skills for years, and once they have honed their skills in that domain they might perhaps start outperforming them by the mythical 10x ratio.
