> His answer was that half the papers in a field are written by the square root of the number of authors.

This is a joke, not a number to base any calculation on, to start with.

> Look at the commit history of almost any important open source project and you'll see Lotka's curve, with a long tail of people who fixed a typo once and a few people who wrote the thing.

I am the guy that fixes just 2 lines. I was the only one that knew which to lines to change, it took me days to find (it has been like that for months).

> VP of Engineering

Yep. It checks. "Elite" is very subjective and it’s easy to take credit when someone else did the work. Some "Elite" engineers I met were really good, some were all talk and no bite but their managers would believe them fully. I really hope that he does not treat his employees based in this kind of bullshit thinking.