[thankful69]

That also depends on the X, from my experience working at FAANGs, startups, etc... I have never seen a 10x engineer in good teams, I have only seen "10x engineers" on teams without great engineers. The comparison with sports and music is pretty silly, as those are environment where the winner(s) take all (there can only be one Billie Eillish (lol) even tho there are many singers who are better), engineering is often a team effort. In the other hand, the best engineers I have seen, just spend more time than anybody else working on a problem, and often are the ones who like to show off more, and very often lack the skills in other areas of life.

[hinkley]

I’ve seen too many prolific engineers who destroy the confidence and productivity of people around them. These are not people you want to aspire to be.

[thankful69]

Yeah, I also think is way more common in smaller companies. Also extreme toxicity around tools, editors, .... stuff like "10x engineers" only use Vim (the classic "i dont need a mouse, thats for normies"), the command line, Arch Linux, etc... In bigger companies, with talented engineer, no single engineer can claim to be the best/10x-er or any nonsense like that, because whatever he does, can also be done(and often improved) by the team. That's why I said that depends on the X. You can certainly have a 10Y engineer where Y = 1/10*X;