Just had a look a the time-line: Apparently this thing is about a decade old and they are still doing experiments on amateur-level and have not refined things to any real degree. Another dead giveaway for fraud. (They do _not_ want to firm up results on fraud!) But from the reaction here, I can see that there are many people which do not have the skills to see what is going on (but think they have them, due to arrogance, nice examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work) and want to believe this badly enough that they ignore the very visible red flags.

For another excellent example of this type of thing, look up the Rossi "E-cat". Although that guy has done some demonstrations where even a few photographs are enough for a competent scientist to find how he faked it. Yet he has a rabid crowd of believers. Go figure.

So you believe anybody can be a star-mathematician as well? Well, understanding reality is also very much bi-modal and you are in the left part. And no, I do not earn the majority of my income from coding. I do review code by others from time to time though and the quality is usually between abysmal and atrocious.

I do not read non-peer reviewed "research" unless I am the reviewer. Most of it is crap.

So in other words they do not have even a basic understanding of how their "device" works. And people believe they have something solid? How dumb can you get?

They do. They will want solid proof and reproducibility, but they most decidedly do.

It is fascinating how long they have been working on this. Typical characteristic of fraud.

There is a sucker born every minute....

...then you are in the wrong business. If the language is interesting, learn it. If you have trouble doing so, change careers to something you have actual talent for.

The whole discussion about factors is wrong. A bad coder (and there are a lot of those around) has _negative_ productivity!

I do not agree. In fact, I have been a 10x coder on occasion. The thing is not that I am extremely good, the thing is that I write very solid code that does not have to be thrown away after a short time or causes more problems than it solves. And I am not that much slower doing it than others are churning out trash. A better explanation would be that most coders are in fact 0.1x coders and should not have gotten into the profession in the first place due to lack of dedication, talent and skill. Then any good coder becomes an 1x coder and that is a far more accurate way of seeing things. An 1x coder in this sense is just somebody that delivers a solid result with good architecture, design and implementation in reasonable time. Most coders cannot do that.

I guess this "10x coder" nonsense comes basically from management being unable that they should never have hired the bad ones. Calling them 0.1x coders makes it amply clear who is responsible. Calling them 1x coders hides that management did screw up badly in hiring them.

It is actually not true. Sure, exams tend to the Gaussian distribution, as the average students must pass somehow. But any well-designed technical exam will have a bi-modal distribution unless everybody is good at it. The thing is that designing exam questions for this is hard: You need to make questions that require an insight in order to be solvable, but once that insight has been had, the answer must be easy.

Potential programming skill is very much bi-modal, just like any other skill that requires abstract thinking. You have it, then learning makes sense, or you do not. Same with most engineering fields, mathematics or physics. Of course, the rockstar vs. cretin comparison is utter nonsense, and just dishonest propaganda language. You just get two Gaussian distributions with not much in-between. "Rockstars" are still rare (and generally not very useful). I have seen this time and again in fellow students, as a teacher, as reviewer etc.

The article is another transparent attempt to make people believe coding is like manual labor and hence should be in the cheapest salary class possible.

I gave a literal quote from the abstract. Can you read?