I think the highly productive programmer who ships features like crazy but leaves a trail of garbage in their wake for others to clean up is actually the most common archetype I’ve seen in real life.

The core issue is the disconnect between leadership and other engineers: the leadership heaps praise on this person, gives them interesting work, and takes projects they think are “behind” away from others for their superstar to work on. The other engineers are left feeling resentful that they have to fix/maintain/extend/support this horrible tangled mess of code, while the “10xer” moves on and never has to deal with cleaning up their own mess. Sometimes management will actively protect the person’s time by asking others not to bother them with questions about their code while they focus on whatever’s next!

The features shipped have visible business value and are easily measured, but the impact on employee morale/retention/velocity is harder to measure, so it’s overlooked.

> I think the highly productive programmer who ships features like crazy but leaves a trail of garbage in their wake for others to clean up is actually the most common archetype I’ve seen in real life.

Yes. I've encountered more of these than I have 10x developers. In fact, I've FIRED more of these than I've encountered 10x developers.

That doesn't mean 10x developers don't exist.

Yep. I’ve noticed that the term “10xer” gets used in both the sarcastic and the serious sense, and it’s important to keep the archetypes and characteristics separate. I tried to clarify in this old comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18462325

There is nothing “imaginary” about it. If you produce code that is harder to maintain, you’re producing negative long term value.

There are plenty of smart pricks in our industry.

Also if you produce code and don’t bother leveling up your coworkers, you’re a long term liability to your company.

The imaginary part of it is that you think that's what I mean by a 10x developer.

It's like insisting that surgeons are terrible people and pointing to Jeffrey Dahlmer because he also cut up people.

While what you are saying is true, sometimes 10x is 10x. They push that feature and it secures an investment round. They push that feature and it secures an important client. They push that feature, don't commit it to the main branch, write tests, commit tests to the main branch,and help the team kill that debt over the course of a few months.