[dragonwriter]

> Lest "different people have different roles" is a confusing factor, let's eliminate the uncertainty. Say I have a team with many responsibilities (including non-technical ones), and it is every developer's responsibility to do these. You will likely never find a 10x employee there.

Yes, if you're team is so poorly managed that has neither top-down not bottom-up organization for efficient task distrobution but instead features mechanistic, blind task distribution, you'll both decrease output even of a team of whatever overall competence and minimize the performance differences on the team that aren't do to absolute superiority on every type of task. Which is why, whether it's agile self-organizing teams or other bottom-up approaches on one side or any kind of top-down management theory on the other, every approach to managing work is about.

> To be clear, I don't doubt that a person is 10x better than the average in doing X, but I've found that X is always a very narrow scope

I find 10× in a narrow scope to be very rare, though it probably happens somewhere. Something more like 3× in a narrow scope of focus personal tasks (e.g., the more complex design and coding tasks) and providing a 2× multiplier on the rest of the team by helping choose efficient direction of focus, identifying problems proactively early, and otherwise keeping the team from wasted/misdirected work that otherwise would get done is both more common than 10× in a narrow field and a bigger productivity win.