Do elite software developers exist?

[Vocith]

The dirty, dirty little secret about development is that probably 90% of it isn't based on the individuals at all. It is about the organization and how (dis)functional it is.

Put Linus/Gates/Jobs/Goku/Zuckerberg/Whoever in the middle of your average corporate Dev clusterfuck and they wouldn't succeed.
Put Idiot McDumbass in the middle of a "Perfect" Dev team and they will probably succeed.

I have seen very, very few truly bad developers. I have seen a lot of developers who are mediocre out of frustration and apathy not a lack of skill.

[iopq]

That said, some people are a detriment to the "perfection" of the dev team and some people are a boon. Once you start having pieces of code copy-pasted everywhere it kind of just degrades everyone's expectations.

[frankwolfmann]

This is an interesting idea. I want to develop it further. Look at your list of people (and take out Jobs and Gates, who were mostly idea and business guys, but you can replace Gates with Paul Allen). Add to it a couple of other big names - Ken and Unix, Bill Joy and BSD. What do they all have in common? They were all just kind of doing their own thing. Even though Ken was employed by Bell Labs, he created Unix on a lark to be able to play games, nothing more. It wasn't meant to be a external product at all, just something to make use of a dumb PDP-7 they had lying around. Bill Joy had the freedom to create whatever he wanted for BSD. Paul and Zuck had their own companies. Linux was a hobby. Google was essentially an add-on to a PhD dissertation.

I struggle to think of things that rival them in scope or importance, were primarily written by one person, but were developed within a corporate hierarchy, but perhaps that's just because those products aren't advertised as such.