I've never understood this argument. To me, it seems obvious that 10X programmers exist.

How much faster would John Carmack produce a new graphics engine than a recent bootcamp grad? How much better would Carmack's be?

I know I've gone to unfair extremes with the question, but it still illustrates the point. Really excellent developers are waaay more productive. The upside is huge. All the time saved avoiding blind alleys based on experience, all the cases where experienced intuition identifies the cause of a bug that would have taken much longer, etc.

the popular claim is 10X better than average. Not 10X better then suck. And definitely not 10X better than a total newbie at the one thing you've worked on your entire career.

Also, it's not actually "10x". That's just easier to write than "an order of magnitude", which is a subjective thing in productivity. The idea is vaguer than the "10x" abbreviation implies.

I don't think that's a good analogy - a run has a very defined course, a very defined technique (you must run, not use a motorcycle), and very defined end point. Most programming problems have infinite solutions, and you're typical 1x developer can only see what they know and have experienced.

To carry the analogy forward, a 10x runner might take a shortcut, use a better implement to complete the course, etc.

It's more about taking an analogy where you compare a normal distribution to something that isn't a normal distribution.

Physical capabilities of organisms (e.g., strength, speed, jumping height, etc.) tend to fall into normal distributions.

Knowledge work where you can take advantage of powerful (mental | software) abstractions don't tend to fall into normal distributions, as previous work can make a bottleneck disappear, leaving you with more mental bandwidth for other concerns, which quickly expands your capabilities.

intelligence is a physical capability.

I wasn't talking about intelligence.

I'm talking about productivity in knowledge work which is different.

Yeah a (slightly) better sporting analogy might be chess. Like chess, programming is a game of knowledge and forethought, where intelligence is an asset, but far from sufficient to elevate you without a ton of practice. However unlike chess, there is no scope or rigid definition of programming, it is as if there were as many pieces with different rules as there are possible positions on a chessboard, and furthermore that the rules of the pieces are made up themselves of subpieces all of which are programmable, and that you can essentially change everything from the behavior of the squares up to the overarching rules.

Now in chess, as in programming, there are clearly some individuals who excel by orders of magnitude over beginners and even average competent players. But because of the vast scope of possibility, programming "grandmasters" will do things that no one else could have even thought of in one domain, while in unfamiliar domains they might require a good deal of study before they surpass the average journeyman practitioner.

Meh, analogies suck.

You're assuming that the difficulty is linear in time, while it could easily be exponential.

I'm assuming we're talking about output measured in the real world. At the forth standard deviation you might be 1 in a million, but you're still not outperforming an average person by 10X.

Then your definition of 10x doesn't apply to a software engineer either. What measurable metric does a "10x developer" outperform the average developer in?

The interpretation that I like is that "10x productivity" is more about what someone doesn't do than what they do do. It's in the sense that they seem more productive, partly because they're really good at what they do, but mostly because none of what they do gets thrown away. They're good at the intangible stuff around the tangible job. Someone can be extremely productive, but they won't be "10x" if they produce a lot of stuff that ends up being useless for any one of dozens of reasons unconnected to the actual job itself.