[yodsanklai]

> I think 10x developers, like world-class athletes, musicians, and authors, absolutely do exist.

For this question to make sense, one should give a better definition of what constitutes the output of a programmer.

In a sense, there are Nx programmers for any arbitrary N because some developers can build things that other can't.

But we can't reduce the work of a software engineer to "programming". Most "programmers" today aren't developing some new hobby systems from scratch (it's the easy part IMHO). They work in the context of a team, they have to deal with legacy code (possibly boring, using technologies they don't like), they write doc, review code, discuss designs and solutions, they give talks to present their work, they train or supervise colleagues, they interact with difficult managers or colleagues and so on...

In that context, I wonder how "star programmers" operate. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are even under-performers.