I definitely was not and am not a “10x engineer”. I spent most of my career until 2020 bopping around as an enterprise dev writing CRUD apps. It was never hard to get a job that paid twice the household income in the US - which is now $70K.

Just for complete transparency, I’m still an enterprise dev writing CRUD apps. I now use “boto3” and write a shit ton of yaml and I am a “consultant”.