More so it means that there ideas, abstractions and frameworks result in substantially higher productivity for anyone working on the project than the average dev.
Beyond just the talent to do this successfully, you also have to give people the space and freedom to actually do 10x work... This tends to extend well beyond the narrow scoped requirements written in the current sprint of tickets.
When talking about 10x devs (or 10x any type of employee), it is about Judgement. The decisions they make on what they work on, how they achieve it, and (probably most importantly) what they choose NOT to work on. Judgement is the deciding factor in whether someone has a 10x impact on the business over time. It absolutely is not how much code they write. As a matter of fact, removing code can be a 10x improvement as well.
Programming, at least complex programming, is a gestalt of many skills ALL of which are probably a normal distribution (intelligence, focus, problem solving, political savvy, curiosity, experience, etc. etc.) How could it NOT have at least a 0.1x to 10x distribution?
Also, I do think there are 10x programmers that are 10x in a myriad of contexts, not just one team.
I am not botching your idea, I just have a different perspective of what the term “10x” means.
*Programming managers have long recognized wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. But the actual measured magnitudes have astounded all of us. In one of their studies, Sackman, Erikson, and Grant were measuring perfor- mances of a group of experienced programmers. Within just this group the ratios between best and worst performances averaged about 10:1 on productivity measurements and an amazing 5:1 on program speed and space measurements! In short the $20,000/year programmer may well be 10 times as productive as the $10,000/year one. The converse may be true, too. The data showed no correlation whatsoever between experience and per- formance. (I doubt if that is universally true.)*
Whole idea is taken out of context. There is nothing about "superhuman 10x dev" it was simple realization that IN ONE TEAM there are developers who are 10x faster to deliver tasks and there are slower devs.
Just like in university group assignment there are slackers and there is that one person who does the assignment.
Worst of all is that people start assigning "10x" to themselves or others or judge others as "0.1x" - which is meaningless out of very specific context.