Meanwhile many competent and useful people will never achieve such output in their entire lifetime. So what magnitude do we assign to this difference? Is that 10x? 100x? Infinity? Whatever the case, it's "a lot" more and the exact measure of these metaphorical numbers are beside the point.
Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source: the fact that we answer to capitalists, people who hold private wealth and will do absolutely anything to retain it, even if it means covering the world in lahars of shit.
If we don’t fix that problem and overthrow the corporate system, there is literally no point in anything we do.
> Nearly all the rot and poison comes from one source
It's tempting to think that all the world problems are coming from a single source and therefore have a simple solution, but usually that's not the case.
Leftists will always blame capitalism. Feminists will blame toxic masculinity (most developers are men, right?). Nazis will blame Jews. Every ideology claims it solves every possible problem, but it never does.
I don’t think you can fairly compare feminism and leftism (well-intended movements) with antisemitism, which has a historical record of resulting in mass murder. And toxic masculinity certainly exists, though not all forms of masculinity are toxic, and I don’t think men ourselves are in any way “toxic”. In fact, toxic masculinity and corporate capitalism are closely intertwined, each being an expression of the other.
The problem with these radical solutions is that they are ultimately unscientific. There's nothing you can say to a feminist that will convince them that wars aren't caused by toxic masculinity. Nothing you can say to a leftist that will convince them that horrors of capitalism don't outweigh the benefits.
At the end it comes to this: you can practice socialism in a capitalistic society. But you can't practice capitalism in a socialistic one.
1x developer might look at the problem and think "this is an interesting and challenging problem to solve, I'll solve it in a week". He solves it in 2 weeks, and despite failing his own deadline feels really good about himself. After all he solved a problem.
10x developer might look at the same problem and think "this is an interesting and challenging problem to solve. I'm not going to solve it today because the impact is too low and cost of the solution is higher than cost of the problem".
1x developer might ship 500 lines of code per day.
10x developer deletes 50 lines of code per day, and ships a 100.
1x developer is good at solving problems.
10x developer is good at not creating problems in the first place.