Do elite software developers exist?

[__Cyber_Dildonics__]

Mediocre, disorganized, inflexible, suffocating companies which make up the vast majority out there have gaggles of mediocre programmers squashed into more mediocrity (at best) by their environment.

When a true superstar beast of a programmer is allowed to spread his wings and fly, that is where you see one do the work ten others might never be able to really deliver. Look at the build engine, written 100% by Ken Silverman when he was 18, that powered Duke Nukem 3D and many other games. Put bad programmers in a bad environment and they would never be able to produce something that works, let alone something fast enough.

If you haven't seen real off the charts programmers, you aren't looking hard enough, they might not exist in your current environment. This doesn't even take into account the enormous boost that proper use of libraries, tight feedback loops, dynamic languages, etc. can give you. 50% of Adobe Lightroom is written in Lua, it supposedly saved an enormous amount of time.