> Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.

The keyword "impactful engineering" needs some clarification though.

It does not mean there's a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off.

A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually become the company's flagship product. That's impact. However, the thing needs to be rewritten from scratch to become production ready or even deployable, and that takes far more work that does not fit the definition of "impactful".

I personally know a principal engineer of a FANG which single-handedly wrote the proof of concepts of more than a few projects that thousands of users use every single day. From his own words following one of his recent presentations, "this needs to be rewritten from scratch as this would get me rejected from our job interviews".