Reading the original article, I can't help recalling what David Cutler said in an interview, that whenever he completed a piece of code, he always ran it in his head a few times to make sure that nothing could go wrong, and then submitted (presumably for testing). His NT code had very few bugs as per say.
I think 10x programmers are indeed usually smarter than ordinary programmers. They don't work out 10x amount of higher quality code, or 10x quality of code, but work in COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DOMAINS -- OS, Compilers, Emulators, etc., they simply solve tougher problems.
And they also have the capacity to hold a lot of code in their brains. This is so amazing. I usually lost myself after just maybe a couple of dozen lines, or a few function hops. Admittedly, my program uses more libraries so TBH the brain trace just stopped whenever it went into a 2000 line long library function. But my project is more trivial than theirs.
I think 10x programmers are indeed usually smarter than ordinary programmers. They don't work out 10x amount of higher quality code, or 10x quality of code, but work in COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DOMAINS -- OS, Compilers, Emulators, etc., they simply solve tougher problems.
And they also have the capacity to hold a lot of code in their brains. This is so amazing. I usually lost myself after just maybe a couple of dozen lines, or a few function hops. Admittedly, my program uses more libraries so TBH the brain trace just stopped whenever it went into a 2000 line long library function. But my project is more trivial than theirs.