>Both my anecdotal experience and independent research into the subject corroborate what Laurent is saying in this interview.

All I know is that I was a better developer at 15 than most professional developers I encounter today, and I'm much better today than I was at 15.

I had no Internet to search for answers. I had no debugger. After I made a change to the game I was writing, it would take 30 minutes to run it (off of a tape). I had to reinvent the idea of linking because I couldn't edit all of the game in the memory I had available; I'd hand link the (ultimately four) app modules by setting constants. After running my game, it would take me 30 minutes to re-load the editor/assembler app and load up one of the modules of my game, so I learned to take careful notes of where things would fail so that I'd be able to fix them in the next editing cycle, and I learned to read the code and understand exactly what it all did and how it all interacted in my head so that it wouldn't break at runtime.

I found and fixed all the bugs in that assembly language game, and it was quite fun at the end, if not very deep (think Space Invaders crossed with breakout, with moving breakout bricks). It was more responsive and smooth in animation than many games are today, and it had no OS support: I was writing directly to the hardware. Hardware that totally sucked for doing games on, by the way.

I'd say 80% or more of professional developers today would have thrown up their hands at the assembly language manual and the hardware reference guide that I used to develop that game. My prior experience was in writing BASIC.

When I do web development or NodeJS or C++ or Python or Go today, everything is so easy by comparison that I can quickly put together much more sophisticated architecture in a few hours than a typical developer can do in weeks. The bar is much lower; people can accomplish simple tasks without much mental effort, and so many professional developers never learn the advanced design or debugging techniques at all.

There was a time when I hired a highly recommended team in the past few years, and they took easily 5x longer (and therefore cost 5x as much) as they should have based on the complexity of the problem I gave them. Painful lesson.

More importantly, I can design systems that are easy to use and understand for other developers, and I've received many compliments on the design of the most popular game library I wrote. You can see some of the game credits here [1]; there were over a hundred published games based on that library. At least half of those were developed by people who used the engine because it was free and good, not because the company I worked for was requiring it.

So I don't need external proof that 10x developers exist. NOTE I'm not claiming to be uniquely brilliant or a unicorn or a genius: I've also met many others who were easily as good or much better than myself at development, at Amazon and at other companies. But I'm at least in the top 5% if not the top 2% of developers, and at my level I really can do things that most developers just can't, and for the tasks an average developer can take on, a top developer can produce code more quickly and of better quality. Except for CSS. I hate writing CSS and I'm sure a CSS expert could write it more quickly than I can. :)

So I tend to speak out in protest at the idea that 10x developers don't exist. Being egalitarian and denying the skill range is popular because junior and average developers outnumber the experts. But it doesn't reflect the full reality. Just maybe 80% of the reality.

[1] http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,13...