I was very happy to have that background when I took part developing statistical models used for wind hazard analysis on nuclear powerplants in my first job out of college.
Which is to say I think starting with the idea that you're aim for x10 is pernicious and tends to create dysfunctional teams. The claim some developers in some circumstances are ten time more productive than others may or may not be true but software development needs processes whose goal is to help an entire team rather than helping an individual to that "level".
Developers should strive to better themselves, but it's important not to fool yourself, too. Having a strong team is almost always better from a business point of view.
I shun "rockstar" and "10x" (and whatever other bullshit moniker they will come up with next) team members. Give me a group of smart people that gel well together, and are highly self-confident without egos getting into the way, and we can move mountains.
I cannot describe how many times I've been shown results and when asking how to reproduce them, after several notes (and sometimes complaints to higher ups) I eventually get a series of command line arguments or a barely functioning R-script.
These conclusions are too important to be so sloppily produced. We need verification, validation and uncertainty quantification for any result provided to decision makers.