[Hippocrates]

I agree, the efficiencies of a 10xer are usually in creative solutions to business problems, and 10x would be on the conservative side of what I’ve personally seen achieved. Unfortunately there are also .1x developers that don’t understand the business, or it’s not part of their role. They crank out tickets of rote changes in a pre-existing system. Any large or architectural work is turned into tech debt because they hamfistedly cram it into some existing system or use whatever tech/pattern they’re used to rather than reasoning about the problem and solution from the ground up. This is an organizational problem as much as a personal one. I’ve seen this a lot with offshore workers because they don’t get to see and interact with as much of the business without a lot of effort and support from the org.

[lmarcos]

I've seen what you described as ".1x developers". It's not a big deal, usually because businesses, that hire .1x engineers, rewrite their entire products every 5 years or so. And when you start fresh from scratch, it doesn't matter if you are a 10x or a .1x: business only cares about pushing something to production as fast as possible. Technical debt will be fixed in the next batch in 5 years... by rewriting.

In more serious/long-term companies, since the interview process is more difficult, you don't usually encounter .1x engineers and what I've described doesn't happen.

All in all, there's room for everyone (.1x and 10x)