I don't think there needs to be a 10x label. It's not healthy to actually call people out as 10x or not publicly, I definitely agree with that.

But the truth is there are people who are insanely productive relative to median, and 10x is just a rough term to refer to them.

I do think it's worth paying those people 2x or more over paying 1x for two median devs. The trick is being able to identify them accurately... that relies on a well honed interview. There's risk in compensating people so highly if your judgment turns out to be wrong.

Certainly definitions won't be universal, but this type of person tends to do very well regardless of the environment/language etc.

Well the label could be anything and the same problems are still around. The same goes for being labeled a software craftsman or not. There's enough flexibility in how we assess peoples' skill that I can accidentally get the label if I just keep trying and the stars align. (This being a genuine, verifiable belief of someone else who's in the field and not me simply lying about what they said). With interviews, those can vary by company and the person giving it. It'd be more consistent if that was focused on a widely known credential and institution that's dedicated to assessing it. When I can take company and people's biases out of it, I can more objectively decide how good I am, what I need to improve on, and what level I should be working jobs at.

I do think certification and credentials can play a much bigger role than they do today.

No, I'm not talking about the BS certifications where you can spend a few hours reading a book and pass a multiple choice test... but something more "elite" and well rounded to give a quality stamp of approval.

It would be a great thing if candidates could go through one process, get that stamp of approval, and receive offers from X companies.. rather than interviewing 100 times. I understand the needs of companies are individual, but most candidates who are "strong" will do well interchangeably at these companies... if it's more of a generic development role.

The difficult thing is that the industry seems very stuck on algorithm and design problems as the sole focus of judging a candidate, which are pretty easy to game (design less so than algorithms). To identify these kind of people you really need to judge real world code and productivity... large projects with more elements of design.

Beyond technical skill, how hardworking is the person? How much will they care? Personality traits like these tend to matter a lot more than specific knowledge.

Anyway... this is kind of a meandering response, but I do believe that in the future we'll have a much better system for interviewing with less redundancy and higher accuracy. The goal is to maximize correlation between performance on the interview and performance "on-the-job".