[lixue]

"assuming they had training on par with what you received" feels unfair: Generally, what makes someone a 10x engineer is exactly that most people lack that level of training, experience, and skill. It's not about innate talent, but it's still a valuable, rare, and therefore marketable skill.

Achieving 100x results isn't something you can guarantee, and it doesn't even involve writing a lot of code. It comes from blocking off a week to automate a task, and never having to deal with it again. It comes from having the experience and political capital to veto a project that would have wasted a year, because you've seen it go wrong before. It comes from improving some tools for the customer service reps, so that they're 5% more efficient (which then adds up to hundreds of hours a day if you're large enough).

Anyone CAN do this, but the people who have the insight, motivation, and skill to actually DO it are rare, and a smart organization should desire to keep them around for years just in case they do it a second time.

[munk-a]

If it's a question of experience then lets briefly discard the bottom 80% of earners, of the 20% left how different do you think their levels of experience could be when they retire?

Do you think the senior devops guy who can single handedly debug a network issue while enjoying a day on the beach is lacking in experience compared to a CEO or did they just get a different type of experience because companies only need one CEO but they need a bunch of devops guys.

I believe a good group in upper management does improve company performance but 100x is unreasonable. There is a talent to being able to respond correctly to different scenarios but you also need to be lucky enough to be in a scenario where wild success is possible and your response is only made possible by the team of people that drive the engine beneath you.