[vaidhy]

There are extremely competent programmers (10x) like there are outstanding players in sports and music. They do have an outsized impact on the projects they work on. However, they are also extremely rare. The problem, IMHO, comes from cult-startups where they think they can (a) identify these people in an interview (b) build a team of only 10x programmers.

This results in (c) calling a whole lot of average programmers they hired as 10x programmers because of (a). After all, they are smart and their interview process is infallible.

So, if you meet one of those rare folks, enjoy the intellectual banter :).

[teaearlgraycold]

Then good luck hiring a well sized team when you’ve set the expectation that everyone needs to be a genius to contribute. A successful startup needs to either attract only the best engineers or build itself so that most of the work can be done by merely good engineers following the company’s engineering culture.