[redisman]

I've also worked with only one truly "10x" developer and dozens of "10x through technical debt" ones. I've very often had to finalize the famous "last 20%" of their projects which is a fun place to be in. "I thought it was almost done?"

There was one guy who worked extremely hard and extremely thoughtfully who was a master at low-level and high-level languages. Kind of a John Carmack type. But these people are like unicorns who you meet once in a career.

[JohnBooty]

     I've very often had to finalize the famous "last 20%" 
     of their projects which is a fun place to be in. 
     "I thought it was almost done?"

Yeah, and then management thinks you are a mere 0.1x or 1x or 0.01x or whatever because you're moving so much more slowly than the "10x" person.

In a fair world (or a fair workplace) I wouldn't mind doing that kind of work. Ideally, I'd say "I'm willing to do whatever it takes to ship good code! Hell, I'll mop the floors or go fetch sandwiches if that's what the team needs at that moment!"

But at this point, I really try to avoid it. Unless your manager is attentive and technically savvy enough to recognize the hell you're wading through, it's basically just career suicide. The 10x person gets farther and farther ahead of you. At the end of the month he's got 100 commits and has shipped 5 features and 9 fixes. Meanwhile, you've done some fraction of that.

When I have junior devs tackle a mess like that, I make sure to put extra effort into recognizing the difficult work they are doing in cleaning up somebody else's mess. I make no claims of being a good senior dev or a good manager or anything like that. But I try to do that one thing right at least.