[crazygringo]

I appreciate what you're saying... but I don't think that's the generally accepted meaning of 10x. You're just describing a good, responsible, effective programmer. Skills like good documentation or secure code are things anyone can learn from training and experience. And the qualities you're describing are also very much a function of what the company requires/expects/incentivizes, rather than what any individual chooses to do.

People generally reserve "10x engineer" who really do have the intellectual capacity and stamina to crank out 10x the amount of code of the same quality as a median engineer.

I think it's important not to confuse the two.

[Trasmatta]

I'm pretty dubious about the idea that this type of engineer actually exists.

[crazygringo]

They definitely do, I've worked with them.

As far as I can tell, it's mainly the ability to hold a lot more "connections" in their head at any one time, and extreme logical rigor.

So that instead of reasoning about just the function they're writing, they're always naturally reasoning about the entire framework it fits into, and so they don't tend to produce bugs where the function doesn't fit in right, where it has weird side effects, where it duplicates code elsewhere, where it will create unforeseen technical debt, etc.

And then their logic is just watertight, always. They don't make all the kinds of basic design and logic errors other programmers tend to repeatedly make.

They sit down, crank out 1,000 lines in a couple of hours, try to compile/run, fix bugs around mismatched braces and misspelled variables, and it just works.

In contrast with someone else who takes a couple days to get it even kind of working, then winds up having to rewrite large parts of it twice because they'd made basic design errors in the first place.

But I still stand by my original point that most programming jobs don't require you to write a tight 1,000 lines often. Most work is plumbing, bugfixes, CRUD, etc. where the connections/logic skills don't really pay off in a big way.