> One single-handedly wrote 85% of <extremely popular and complex app you've used> and another wrote most of the internal libraries at <company you've heard of>.

There is a trap here, though. There is another group of engineers, who jump on any greenfield project before everyone else manages to discuss the plan and then they write some code very quickly, showing you a "finished" solution. Those people often appear 10x to management as well. However, after deploying their code to production, it turns out it has many issues and is a source of never ending frustration for the people who maintain it. Unfortunately at that time the "super hero" has moved to a new greenfield project, and is not willing to fix their bugs or help because they are "busy" or "in a flow".

I don't think those people are really 10x. They are often an annoyance to the rest of the team and if the management doesnt break this pattern early, you end up with a team where one person codes 90% of stuff, gets most of the credit, but 10 other people get frustrated maintaining it, and overall the team pace is not 10x higher, but may be even slower than a similarly sized group of average devs.

So if you are in a management position, don't just look at how much code a person writes in a short time or what percentage of the product they created, but also look at the quality of their work and how good they are at sharing their knowledge with the rest of the team.

Having said that, I have met some true 10xers who created high quality stuff fast and were very helpful to their teammates, but they are quite rare and often don't get all the praise they deserve, particularly in environments valuing the "ship fast and break things" strategy.

Engineers often overestimate how bad the “greenfielder” is for the business. In most cases you aren’t selling an elegant technical solution, you’re just selling a solution. And if you don’t ship it ASAP you won’t have time to worry about maintainability, you’ll be bankrupt.

For most businesses, a greenfielder is a 10x engineer.

(This is just an aside, I agree that there exist “true” 10x-ers having had the joy of working with 2 of them over the last 20 years).

I didn't mean just inelegant code, but buggy, incorrect, incomprehensible code that does not meet business requirements and, after being demoed internally to management and getting all the praise, requires significantly more work to get to production level quality.

Anybody can be a 10x if they don't have to solve the problem correctly.

Also, pushing a very low quality product to production too early might just as well kill the company as pushing a great product too late. History knows plenty of late comers who won the market.

A programmer comes to an interview.

- What are your strengths?

- I'm fast at maths.

- Cool, how much is 1563 * 74?

- 66689

- That's not even close to correct!

- But it was fast.

The one idea I don't like surrounding 10x engineers is the rhetoric by startups or companies around hiring is "we're only looking for rockstars and 10x engineers", which naturally denigrates the majority of (1x) engineers. This launches a broader discussion of whether success in business manifests by scaling up or scaling out, and I tend to be a proponent of Locke than Hobbes.

So the controversial nature comes from the implication that most of the workforce (1x engineers like myself) are worthless and not worth hiring, and also the hubris of thinking a 1x company can hire and retain a/only 10x engineers (these same startups/companies usually offer a 1x or less compensation package). If you think I'm wrong, then fire 90% of your engineers and see where that gets you; that would be an interesting result if productivity increased!

I think this is separate from mere jealousy or denial; 10x engineers definitely do exist and I look up to them for inspiration and example.

> The one idea I don't like about 10x engineers is the rhetoric by startups or companies around hiring is "we're only looking for rockstars and 10x engineers"

Completely agree. That's recruiting/marketing bullshit. They're trying to appeal to people's egos, but probably have the opposite effect, as you say.

Also, I doubt one could actually recognize these top-tier engineers, at least not in today's standard interviews. But... I did actually job-interview a 10x'er for a startup years ago. It wasn't a standard interview but rather a long, casual lunch (he was a friend-of-a-friend). After two hours of talking about engineering/coding/etc, I started to suspect: "Huh, I think this guy might be a better than me." What I didn't realize is just how much better than me he would turn out to be -- it was amazing and a joy to learn from him.

You are 100% correct. Talent matters in any activity. Including software development. Pretending that software developers is the one exception to this rule is just silly. But it does protect the ego of insecure developers.