Bellard is who I reference in these situations also. He's a sort-of empirical refutation of the assertion "10x programmers don't exist". I always liked that he lists qemu and ffmpeg on his website as afterthoughts mixed in with all the other code he's written.
Bellard is obviously 10x (or 100x) engineer when you need to port Linux kernel to JavaScript or compute the longest Pi sequence.
But most jobs aren't like that and require a mixed skillset - problem solving, people skills, stress resistance etc. and it's entirely unclear how Bellard would fare there.
But the question isn't about those skills, the question is about programming. Bellard is blatantly an insanely productive programmer.
Also if you think a man who can build an LTE base station from scratch isn't good at "problem solving" I really don't know what metric we're talking about anymore.
