"Why are we trying to turn programmers into product managers?"

Nobody is doing that AFAICT, it's just why being a consultant is different from having a job.

"Aren't you going to see a lot of the same requirements from projects as a consultant? <snip> That's just paying for experience."

Well sure. It's the experience and the domain knowledge that makes that somebody can do something at a higher speed than someone else, and that somebody knows what a customer is looking for without them having to spell it all out. I'm nobody special, and I'm certainly not claiming that I'm a '10x consultant' in the sense that I'm 10x better than the average or whatever. I was just reflecting on the underlying mis-assumptions in the GP's question.

Also, it's not because somebody bills 200/hour that they make 2004050 per year. Jobs are not like doing consulting. I'm doing OK, but (after discounting for everything) I'm making roughly what a senior employee would. Some do better, again I'm not claiming I'm anything special (and I guess I shouldn't have made this about me by mentioning an example from my own work) but some of the 'calculations' I've seen in this thread are nonsense. It's like people saying 'Mohammed Ali made x million per second in his fights'. Uh, sure.

The most difficult part of most software projects is the interface between people who have the problem and programmers. Most programmers don't have the ability to handle this part themselves. This is why we have product managers/business analysts. If you can perform both roles, it's amazing how much faster/better the project goes.

Product manager is an imperfect solution to a problem your customer doesn't care about any more than he cares about the name of the obscure sorting algorithm you used to scale his system 1000x.

Experience is highly valuable in itself as well as being relatively scarce

More to the point of the post, it sounds like 10x is a marketing rebrand for experienced developers (genuine experience, not 1 year repeated 10 times). Especially if 10x is more about the soft skills. I have no idea what level of technical talent a 10x dev might need.

lots of experience and the ability to learn a new language and be productive in 2-3 days and have skills in hot tech I have seen data science gigs at 1000$/day and that's in the uk where rates seem to be lower

1000$ ~= 640 pound ~= 800 euro - that's what a 'regular' consulting firm (i.e. not big four who will charge double that, but medium sized regional players) charged for a fresh out of school grad, in the UK. It's only slightly more than what a secretary in a law firm costs (although to be fair, they don't get billed out by the day). It's roughly what the most simple engineering studies are billed at ('calculate required dimensions for this steel beam with uniform load' - i.e. the sort of work they let (supervised) interns do, structural engineering 101).

Really, everybody reading this (yes also those in the UK!), if you are an experienced or senior software engineer and you're billing yourself out at these rates ($1000 a day), you're leaving money on the table. If the mentioned work is what I consider 'data science' (i.e., advanced applied statistics requiring fair amounts of high-end, performant software engineering), then $1000/day is really low if it's for anything more than what somebody can do as a weekend gig next to their day job.

Agree although I would say that big 4 consulting firms charge much lower _average_ day rates than many small-mid agencies. It's a particularly effective ploy for winning gov and big infrastructure contracts. They make money by scaling to 100's of bodies on projects, mostly offshore (and even then their overall margins are wafer thin due to huge operational inefficiencies and shoddy program management).