The 10x meme is a software thing. From my experience as an engineer outside of software it is rare to be working on something by yourself mostly you are part of a team and you get the best results by leveraging the strengths of each engineer in the team.

To use the example in this thread Dan is the engineering manager, he assigns the latest project to Clyde. Clyde knows he is going to require some modelling work and that Alice is the CFD expert so he asks her to model some cases for him. He recalls that Bob worked on a similar problem for a different client a few years ago so he wanders over to Bob's desk to chat with him about what worked and what didn't. During the conversation Bob mentions he read a recent paper that might be relevant...

Clyde doesn't need to be 10x as efficient as Alice or Bob because he knows they can get more done by cooperating then by competing. That is efficiency in action.