- Fewer managers - a group of 10 will probably require a programming lead who spends some fraction of their time not coding.
- One tenth the amount of office space and hardware.
- Only paying for one person's health insurance instead of ten peoples'.
- Vastly reduced communications overhead - a team of 10 people is going to spend a lot of time communicating with each other to insure that everyone is doing what they need to be doing.
So I'm guessing you'll come out ahead even if you do pay ten times more for ten times the productivity. But companies rarely even pay twice as much for a developer who is exceptionally productive.
The downside of having one person doing the work of ten is that it's a disaster when the person decides to quit - it's the equivalent of a whole team of people simultaneously quitting.
My tongue is in my cheek or some other such place right now because I kinda find this 10x business a bit funny, given that we can't even roughly quantify productivity. The thing I do believe in is that some people fit some kinds of work so well that it's silly to consider many other seemingly similarly qualified people as a practical alternative; as in, a hammer is good at hammering and it's not a question of it being 10x better than a shoe or 5x, it's just silly to hammer with a shoe, just don't do it. This is obvious but if phrased as "hammers are 10x shoes", it loses its obviousness and gains ridiculousness.
Suppose the earning/engineer multiplier is 4x: if you make 4x for each 1x engineer, you should make 40x from a 10x engineer.
And, currently the earnings/engineer multiplier in most well known bay area tech companies is enormous.
Do you want a kitchen with 10 chefs and the coordination that demands, or a kitchen with 1 chef that is just as productive as the raw sum of the 10 chefs? Assuming that the productivity of each chef was tested in isolation.