[Jensson]

That was my point, arguments such as yours are just arguing with strawmen. 10x is compared to another professional in the same domain. Saying that the engineer isn't as effective at another domain as a professional of that other domain is arguing with a strawman.

[Jetrel]

It's not really a strawman considering it's EXACTLY what most companies are trying to do: make programmers fungible across domains. Critically; they're doing this because they typically have no visibility into these skillsets from the managerial level, and they typically only have one or two programmers "in a given domain" on a team - even in a very, very large company. The company would like to pretend these people are fungible, and can be interchangeably swapped out, but the reality is they have no immediately replacements on the team.

There's no sense in doing an apples-to-apples comparison when you've only got one apple, an orange, and a pear.