Why is this ‘myth’ talked about here in negative terms?

From my professional experience, it’s obvious that there are coworkers that can output even 100x impact qhen compared to peers. When judging entrepreneurs it’s visible some people’s multiplier/productivity is in the million-times compared to others.

Given automation is at the core of our work as devs, why do some people think 10x isn’t credible?

I totally agree that it's possible for people to produce a ton more value than others. I just think it's super rare.

In my experience it's a lot more common that I see people churning out 10x the AMOUNT of code (or some other insane metric) which generates an enormous amount of work for everyone else to keep up with, fix, maintain, understand, etc. These people are praised for their output. But are they making the TEAM 10x more productive? No way.

Prolific output doesn't always mean 10x value created. I know people know this, but I think the reason people are sick of the trope is because they've been burned by a "10x'er" that was all output, not actual value.

Producing 10x value is actually.. really, really hard.

I don’t think that’s quite true. I probably write 10x less code than most of my colleagues, but where I write code it impacts (and hopefully improves) everything.

I think we agree!

At my work the guy who wrote pretty much all of the code can fix stuff far faster than me. But then it's not documented, not tested and he is really unhelpful at explaining it to others. Is that really a 10x engineer, when the fact others have difficult is down to the way he works?

As long as some companies can get away with replacing an entire team (including managers) with 1-4 highly skilled developers, the myth will remain.

As a practical example, consider 4 people beating Windows Mobile with what later became Android.

There are still plenty of places with 1/10X programmers.

I've worked with at least three people who were -x programmers. That is, they produced negative value to the organisation.

They did this by breaking systems (DNS, build pipelines, etc), producing code so bad that it had to be rewritten from scratch, and distracting everyone on the team through drama.

They also did it through endless requests for help - not the kind where they learn from it, though. The kind where they ask the exact same question next week of someone else. They would cycle through asking everyone on the team about the minutiae of their job, because they had no idea how to do it themselves.

I realise that the idea of the '10x rockstar' is an unpleasant one. But I also know that the best people I've worked with over the years were at least ten times better than the worst.

Yes, thank you for saying this. I feel that you may be lucky to have only encountered 3 of these...even if on reflection I’ve only encountered an obvious 2.

Let me add that I enjoy teaching folks, that I enjoy being a multiplier even if it means I won’t be an additive. I am also an apologist, and willing to believe that people are adding important ingredients to a team or output that aren’t immediately obvious or visible.

But -x folks exist.

Unfortunately the -x folks often DO have significant skills at hiding their negative impact.

> Unfortunately the -x folks often DO have significant skills at hiding their negative impact.

Any who remain employed, while being persistently -x (or -anything) would have to.