I once went through quite an experience. Used to work with a guy that was awarded a big prize in his field. I think one day he got tired of being treated as "some kind of genius", as he said. He started to discuss a topic one day, listening to my answers and questions back and forth. At the end the discussion hit a point where we could not go further. He then told me: "if you then submitted this as a proposal, were lucky enough to have it granted and just answered the last question you asked me with a simple experiment, you would receive the same prize as I did".

That guy was great.

Probably underestimates it. Not my field, I don't know of this guy but a few hundred citations is you write a library that everyone uses and similar academic recognition and academic platinum for tenure on the background of other publications. 300 000 is the equivalent of writing the Linux kernel or sqlite.

https://www.nature.com/news/the-top-100-papers-1.16224

It really isn't -- unless you're talking something like bzip2 or some extremely nontrivial thing.

i've written code used by at least a billion people over fifteen years. i'm nobody and it was nothing. so definitely not on par

That really is knocking his efforts. How is that constructive?

Right - that’s impressive