There's an implication later that he might have been 10x because he was cutting other people down – turn everyone else into a 0.1x developer and the 1x developer starts looking good.

I'd take that claim skeptically. But another consideration is that more than half of a team's work isn't code. You have to write the right thing, not just something, and that requires time and communication. So he might have been a 10x coder and a 0.1x communicator – indeed since he seemed to have little interest in interpersonal relations, some amount of his performance may have been due to his own time allocation choices.

Two of those people together would perform very poorly on some projects. And very well on others, depending on the clarity of the project and the amount of technical challenge it presented.

In my current job, I have to deal with once certain 10x programmer with... how to put it charitably... some distinct lack of social graces. He's better than everybody else but not 10x better, also, he does not make everyone 10x dumber, thought there's some rework that everyone has to do to accomodate his demands.

I have come to believe that about half of his enhanced productivity is simply that he's a rock star and management tolerates him (but not everyone else) cut the red tape. In general, every commit has to bee peer reviewed, but he just jumps and ninja edits the code base at leisure. Everybody is supposed to run regressions before commiting, but from time to time, things will stop working and it will be some of his transactions behind it (which is discovered after multiple people could not do any productive work for half a day, trying to figure out what when wrong with their own work instead). If some tool or another is suboptimal, he will just roll out his own and be done with it (leaving the rest of the team to learn how to work with his prefered tools, instead).

Fortunatelly, we have other very strong developers that act as counterweight to him. Unfortunatelly, they also come with their own quirks of character and you are bonded to run into one of their pet issues from time to time.

No matter how much two such folks might deserve one another, I'm not sure companies could afford to watch their final two coders refuse to cooperate over trivial shit like line length.

Is that the definition of "jerk" now?

I was thinking the same thing. There are diminishing returns with most jerks if they are marginally better than the rest of the team, but if they are 10x better, maybe you just need a team of 1.

One of my favorite interview stories was when I was interviewing for a very low-level dev position at a major telecom. I was interviewing to become member #8 or so on this team.

It was for writing dial-up internet billing software, essentially grant/deny access and provide hours connected to the dial-in banks. Nothing all that crazy, a pretty solved problem honestly by that point.

I asked them what they were replacing and why. The team lead got super excited and talked about how they were hired on to replace a single guy who had wrote a ~1000 line Perl script that pretty much handled this whole data import job. This guy apparently made the cardinal sin of using moderately complex regex in his tooling, and that was a sign of how incompetent he was and how the tooling obviously needed to be replaced wholesale.

They did not get the irony of this situation whatsoever when I made the obvious statement of why it took an 8 man team over 12 months so far to replace a single dude with a 1000 line Perl script. Absolutely saw nothing wrong with the situation whatsoever.

Thankfully I ended up not taking that job and starting my own company instead :)

to their defense pearl IS a write only language... /s

Maybe, but it's also true that cranking out code is not the same as qualify software development. Lots of people can churn out code, that's the easy part.