Software engineer Charity Majors challenges the "10x engineer" myth, arguing that true productivity lies in team performance, not individual brilliance. She encourages building workplaces where "normal" engineers can thrive. Are we focusing too much on hiring "the best" instead of the right people?
Moving fast doesn’t have to mean poor workmanship.
To make an analogy, if you want to be able to make a cup of coffee fast, you need to make sure that the coffee beans, the water, and the brewer are all near each other, that there is electricity and that the water is running. These are all things that enable you to move fast, but they don’t decrease quality, if anything they increase quality because you aren’t wasting time and effort tackling obstacles unrelated to brewing.
Which is in fact the point of the article. That you should make sure you have a good development environment, with support systems and processes, so that you can work effectively even if your developers are not savants. Rather than trying to hire people who are good enough to do a decent job even in the worst environments.