Comment by avar

It's entirely possible that the subject of the article is a terrible programmer, if he were to sit down and write or maintain something as an individual contributor.

I've worked with people like that, who were pretty bad individually, but brilliant when part of the right team.

Writing code and directly enabling the productivity of others who are writing code are different skillsets.

Obviously there's some overlap, but you're most productive in Tim's role in you're complimenting the skillset of the person writing the code.