I totally agree, but I think you can use examples closer to home.
Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics (quality, cost, time to deliver) than I could. Still too far? Pick your field, there'll be experts.
You can get even closer to home. After 20 year, I really feel like I'm at least 10x developer across a number of metrics (e.g., value to my employer, amount of complexity I can manage) than I was when I started.
Also, some developers do more harm than good. An employer would literally be better paying them not to do work.
I always use competitive coding as an example. There are children in Ukraine / India / Russia / wherever who I'm sure will always be able to whoop my ass in these competitive coding things. I try really hard and get nowhere, and when I look at their submissions it's some inscrutable / clever thing that solves the problem orders of magnitude faster than I could ever do.
The only way through this all is to recognize that it's okay to feel stupid, even if it's pretty much all the time. I'd rather feel stupid and challenge myself than sit around bored (e.g. with Monolith Maintenance).
Commander Keen was the first side scrolling platformer for PC (side scrolling was hardware accelerated on consoles, so PC games didn't have it before this) and released 1991. Wolfenstein 3d was the first fps and released 1992. Both of those were revolutionary and combined is more than enough to put him way above most other game programmers at the time.
And you know, at the time he didn't have any experience! That was his first few years as a professional programmer! So your hypothesis that he was only effective since he worked in a domain he had tons of experience in is wrong! He had less experience than most other programmers but was way more effective in many different areas.
Side scrollers have existed since the Apple II on "PCs". I highly doubt that 1991 was the first side scroller on ibm pc.
Wolfenstein was not the first 3d fps on ibmpc, and certainly not in "PC" land. Skyfox existed on the Apple II, and battlezone likely was ported at some point.
Carmack was fantastic, but again his "requirements" are static and he is a dev team of one.
A lot of early jump & run games worked on a screen-by-screen basis (Prince of Persia, Lode Runner, etc) rather than actually having smooth, NES-style scrolling.
In any case, this Wikipedia article [1] backs up that the only real predecessors of Keen on PC were early-80s console ports that were extremely limited in other ways, like having boxy, low color count graphics.
seadragon on the apple II did scrolling, as did a lot of shmup and shmup ports.
I've never written a side scroller so I don't know how much of the gravity/platform mechanic complicates the scrolling, but I imagine it's about the same thing as shmups with hitboxes, sprites, etc.
Mazewar was the first FPS, but Wolf3D was a totally different class of game, and every FPS since then has been an imitation of Wolf3D. Agreed about CKeen.
> Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics
But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness.
Sometimes being 10x is only a matter of being free to help the best you can.
EDIT: where Carmack shows that he is well above average is not in coding, but in being extremely pragmatic and thous being able to extract good, almost unbiased, information out of every discussion, even the more unpleseant ones.
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Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn't actually be good.
"I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good." It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.
People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn't want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that "Steve appreciates vigorous conversation".
Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn't appreciate that. The Steve Jobs "hero / sh*head" rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready.
Carmack is exceptional, not just 10x, but how many above average people work with a Steve Jobs and can't prove it and do not even realize it?
Carmack is not an actual good benchmark here, but even as good as he is, he met his kryptonite
Don't assume that great workers will perform great in every condition, because that's not a realistic assumption and only puts pressure on younger people for no reason.
We must not support the idea that if you're not Carmack you can't be worth (at doing your job. *only *) more than the others or the company's average.
What are you talking about, John Carmack never worked directly with Steve Jobs? He had his own company and he sometimes had to talk with Apple as a platform vendor, but they never worked together on a title. He didn't like Jobs as a person but that is another story.
John Carmack ran a video game company. Steve Jobs ran a platform, the Apple. Therefore John Carmack sometimes talked to Steve Jobs about things he needed from the Apple platform. John Carmack had a very negative experience in those interactions, yes. But John Carmack never worked with Steve Jobs on any project. Steve Jobs was never the boss of John Carmack.
If you disagree please link an article where it says that they did work together on anything and that during that project John Carmack's performance was significantly reduced. I haven't found such an article, and it would be strange since they never worked at the same company.
That he did a few keynotes at Apple isn't really working together. And him refusing to take a keynote that would force him to reschedule his wedding is just him being healthy and Steve Jobs being an ass, I'd say that is evidence that Steve Jobs didn't really have any power over him.
> If you disagree please link an article where it says that they did work together
It would have sufficed to read the Carmack post.
Seriously, random internet guy, he literally *said it himself*
> When NeXT managed to sort of reverse-acquire Apple and Steve was back in charge, I was excited by the possibilities of a resurgent Apple with the virtues of NeXT in a mainstream platform.
*I was brought in* to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve.
> I wound up doing *several keynotes with Steve* (see the word WITH?), and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method.
Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics (quality, cost, time to deliver) than I could. Still too far? Pick your field, there'll be experts.
You can get even closer to home. After 20 year, I really feel like I'm at least 10x developer across a number of metrics (e.g., value to my employer, amount of complexity I can manage) than I was when I started.
Also, some developers do more harm than good. An employer would literally be better paying them not to do work.