> About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with Spanner.

I'm not convinced. I've worked in many industries and many company sizes and I've met smart people everywhere. I think a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD could create these kind of systems if they were in a situation that called for them (hell, it gives you a chance to actually use all that stuff from your CS degree), just as I know for sure that a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD are more than capable of creating a programming language. The bottleneck isn't technical ability, it's being in an environment that will actually pay you to work on that stuff.

Some people convince themselves that Lebron isn't that good, that the guy at the high school across town was almost as good. Or that they can hit a 90 mph fast ball. Or that they could take Mike Tyson. There are all these funny stories of guys wanting to fight Mike, race Michael Johnson etc. They really just can't see how far they are away from the really freakishly talented folks.

Folks like Jeff Dean at Google are really out there. He built a number of systems that very few people were capable of. But you have to be at a certain level to even see it.

some of the most valuable companies on earth are "just CRUD apps", which was the point of the comment above. Knowing what to build is important, which google fails at in most cases. Google has incredible engineers working on stupid projects

Sure, but it's a non-sequitur from my comment.