The article presupposes the 10x engineer is a common thing. It's about as true as Linus Pauling is true. It did happen. It happens a French metric tonne less than people think, and typically is somebody applying what I would call "computing tropes" to existing inefficiently deployed solutions in barely above hypothesis state, to scaleable solutions. Carmack was given a problem well suited to his temperament and circumstances. Given another problem in different qualities and dimensions, how well he would have performed is unknown.<p>We also underplay how often the "hacks" are well known, such as loop unrolling, or exploiting chip specific behaviours, or simply picking the O(rightsize) algorithm to replace the ones in use.<p>Biochemists very rarely have any of these luxuries. You can't often hack how cells work to make 10x happen. I'd say finding the rotting cantaloupe with a 1000x more productive penicillin mould, that might be a time. Or Du Pont scaling the British techniques for penicillin production using China pans to industrial scale: even they were leveraging Chaim Weizmanns approach to ABE in WW1. Russians doing phage therapy, now that's a hack. What a hack, mind you.