[dasil003]

The concept of the "10x engineer" has vastly outlived its usefulness. Remember, it originally was a response to clueless non-technical management who thought that programmers were completely fungible—the type of thinking that led to early waves of offshoring based on headcount costs, and a willful ignorance that the details that technical staff spend their time working on actually matter.

But once you get past the pointy-hairs, all this framing does is set up a falsely quantitative comparison between broad swathes of engineers whose work can not and should not be compared in this way. Is it really any surprise that a meme created for the bean counters is going to draw ire and vitriol from passionate, diligent and opinionated software professionals?

There is absolutely no point in the general debate about what "10x engineer" is (or whether it really exists). Yes, people have vastly different skills. Yes, there are things which some engineers can do which others could never do. Yes, there are Dunning-Kruger cases without the chops, humility or awareness to acknowledge this. Trying to quantify and strictly define those things though? Pointless.