You've really hit the nail on the head here, and my response to the article was along the same lines:
Solving the right problem in the right way is the key of programmer productivity. Every programmer in existence who has a baseline of critical thinking has written the wrong code before, and then reflected on it and improved it. You can do this at any level of abstraction from the details of bit flipping all the way up to whole systems architectures. The very best programmers are the ones who are able to think about the gestalt most effectively. This is a tremendously difficult task give our limited conscious brain capacity, and I constantly feel myself bumping up against the edges of it when I work on a big project.
One example of a programmer I really look up to is Yehuda Katz because of his work on Bundler. Rubygems had an awful lot of pain points for large projects, and worse, it had a culture of borderline denial about the existence of these pain points. Yehuda and Carl Lerche worked relentlessly to come up with a solution that addressed 99% of all the recurring projects across a wide variety of scenarios. Then they powered through over a year or more to hammer it into a reliable solution built independently and only loosely coupled with Rubygems. Sure it took months and months and untold hours of hard work, but in the end they effected in a sea change in Ruby dependency management which would have been impossible without the ability to see all sides of a very multi-faceted problem. To me that goes beyond 10x because you could have 1000 good engineers and still not be able to design Bundler.
Solving the right problem in the right way is the key of programmer productivity. Every programmer in existence who has a baseline of critical thinking has written the wrong code before, and then reflected on it and improved it. You can do this at any level of abstraction from the details of bit flipping all the way up to whole systems architectures. The very best programmers are the ones who are able to think about the gestalt most effectively. This is a tremendously difficult task give our limited conscious brain capacity, and I constantly feel myself bumping up against the edges of it when I work on a big project.
One example of a programmer I really look up to is Yehuda Katz because of his work on Bundler. Rubygems had an awful lot of pain points for large projects, and worse, it had a culture of borderline denial about the existence of these pain points. Yehuda and Carl Lerche worked relentlessly to come up with a solution that addressed 99% of all the recurring projects across a wide variety of scenarios. Then they powered through over a year or more to hammer it into a reliable solution built independently and only loosely coupled with Rubygems. Sure it took months and months and untold hours of hard work, but in the end they effected in a sea change in Ruby dependency management which would have been impossible without the ability to see all sides of a very multi-faceted problem. To me that goes beyond 10x because you could have 1000 good engineers and still not be able to design Bundler.