I hate that term "10x", because it assumes there is a known quantifiable metric to find these people. (A skepticism appreciated in this article, though I don't know that it really comes to a clear conclusion either on the "reality".)
There are definitely people of a certain caliber who can solve problems others cannot, or way faster, from soup to nuts.
But when it comes to a large preexisting code base, solving prohlems in code can be done in different valid ways, which reflects our thinking patterns. Each of these ways then has corollaries about how the next set of problems is better solved in it. When one developer who has been with the company longer, given more clout for some reason, lucked out to be the green fields guy, or maybe really was somewhat better than the others gets to have his thinking pattern become the first principles of the major feature set, he may seem like he's 10x, but I'm not so sure with a different set of initial conditions that it would be so. And I think a lot of the measurements are taken on code bases in this gray area: not solving code interview problems.
Then there's the question of speed to full execution vs. maintainability, quality of the solution to deal with the next set of business demands, etc... I'm just not so sure it's that easily measurable.
There are definitely people of a certain caliber who can solve problems others cannot, or way faster, from soup to nuts.
But when it comes to a large preexisting code base, solving prohlems in code can be done in different valid ways, which reflects our thinking patterns. Each of these ways then has corollaries about how the next set of problems is better solved in it. When one developer who has been with the company longer, given more clout for some reason, lucked out to be the green fields guy, or maybe really was somewhat better than the others gets to have his thinking pattern become the first principles of the major feature set, he may seem like he's 10x, but I'm not so sure with a different set of initial conditions that it would be so. And I think a lot of the measurements are taken on code bases in this gray area: not solving code interview problems.
Then there's the question of speed to full execution vs. maintainability, quality of the solution to deal with the next set of business demands, etc... I'm just not so sure it's that easily measurable.