The downside is that if you solve hard problems without breaking any sweat, most people won't notice at all. In order to not only perform 10x but also get rewarded 10x you need additional skills of playing politics and marketing yourself.
If a 1X programmer is taken to be the worst or lowest quartile and not the median or competent programmer then this 10X is pointless and misleading.
This 1x programmer has no productivity whatsoever, has a negative contribution to any project they are on, damage designs and confuse meanings and doesn't even use the results of the time they consume from other programmers to improve because having copied the answer, their boss thinks they are improving and is off their back.
A top quartile programmer would be a more meaningful statement when considering HR decisions particularly since productivity is usually going to drop fast when changing workplace, domain, preferred languages, development styles, and coworkers.
You aren't getting 10x what you would expect given that you are optimistic in whoever you hire.. You are getting about 2.5x iff they are "10X".
A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance.
The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work.
Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]