It may be worth emphasizing that the context of this post is a Twitter thread claiming 10x developers were worth actively recruiting even though they don’t mentor, keep odd hours, don’t communicate, etc. there are certainly exceptional engineers especially in the context of a given company. There are also prima donnas who may be talented but in most cases justify a hard pass.
That twitter thread was a train wreck in so many aspects. It favored individual performance over team work, it suggested a lot of supposed "telltale" signs that were so unrelated to actual work that reminded me of phrenology, and it even included some things that are counterproductive or that you really don't want in a development team.
If anything, that thread described cowboy programmers, not 10x engineers.
That thread certainly tried to box 10x devs into stereotypes. People like Jeff Dean or Steve Wozniak don’t really fit into it (but Linus Torvalds probably does). However, I’d say a many types of work require synthesis from one brain which has obsessively prepared itself over the years. I doubt if any amount of team work by usual musicians or painters could have produce 9th Symphony or The Starry Night.
Those things you describe are more or less fundamentally individual endeavors, however. I'll concede that there may be narrow domains where such work can be a net positive within a larger organization but it's not the way to bet.
The fact of the matter is that the tech industry is based far more on collaboration and collective innovation than individual acts of anti-social genius.
Yes, that’s why I said “many types of work“, not all types of work. I don’t expect any single genius working alone to put man on the moon or build modern cloud service or entire smartphone OS. However, I also don’t expect any committee to invent great programming language or font or new architectural paradigms from scratch.
