I think other responses to this thread are insightful, offer valuable ways forward and get at the heart of the matter but I wanted to add one idea that I don't think gets enough traction which is that being a "10x" developer is highly context dependent and is not a fundamental attribute of a person.
Deep familiarity within a code base provides the knowledge to recognize, diagnose and fix problems at a rate that's orders of magnitude faster than someone who isn't. Familiarity with tools, corporate structure, programming idioms, toolchains or other technical factors also provide potential orders of magnitude speedup.
Take a "10x" developer in one context, put them in another, and they can easily become a "1/10x" developer. One company I worked for hired an intern that had created a well used FOSS package with 10k+ GitHub stars. Though a bit of a stretch to my argument, there are other anecdotes about corporations mishandling productive programmers [0]. My point is not to lash companies too harshly but to point out that the incentives are misaligned for the skillset these programmers have versus what skillset companies need and/or are willing to pay for.
My bet is that there's probably a small army of programmers that basically do mundane "1x" programming but create FOSS packages that generate millions in worth (that is, they are "10x" outside of the confines a corporate environment).
As an aside, I'll mention a talk about "The Ideal Language to Write Open Source Software" [1]. On the face of it, it sounds absurd but the argument is essentially that corporate environments select for programming languages that don't need deep proficiency whereas open source software projects select for programmers with deep comprehension of their tools. In other words, corporate environments select for programmer fungability whereas open source software projects, since they often only have a single developer, select for languages that offer high productivity gains from expertise.
Deep familiarity within a code base provides the knowledge to recognize, diagnose and fix problems at a rate that's orders of magnitude faster than someone who isn't. Familiarity with tools, corporate structure, programming idioms, toolchains or other technical factors also provide potential orders of magnitude speedup.
Take a "10x" developer in one context, put them in another, and they can easily become a "1/10x" developer. One company I worked for hired an intern that had created a well used FOSS package with 10k+ GitHub stars. Though a bit of a stretch to my argument, there are other anecdotes about corporations mishandling productive programmers [0]. My point is not to lash companies too harshly but to point out that the incentives are misaligned for the skillset these programmers have versus what skillset companies need and/or are willing to pay for.
My bet is that there's probably a small army of programmers that basically do mundane "1x" programming but create FOSS packages that generate millions in worth (that is, they are "10x" outside of the confines a corporate environment).
As an aside, I'll mention a talk about "The Ideal Language to Write Open Source Software" [1]. On the face of it, it sounds absurd but the argument is essentially that corporate environments select for programming languages that don't need deep proficiency whereas open source software projects select for programmers with deep comprehension of their tools. In other words, corporate environments select for programmer fungability whereas open source software projects, since they often only have a single developer, select for languages that offer high productivity gains from expertise.
[0] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210306150046/https://ftp.osuos...