[dragonwriter]

I don't think the idea is that a 10x engineer doesn't do the same thing a 1x engineer does at 10 times the speed, I think the idea is that a 10x engineer delivers 10 times the value that a 1x engineer does (or the same value at 1/10 the cost.)

(IIRC seeing a study several years back which suggested a 10x increase in cost to address an issue for each step later in the "requirements -> development -> acceptance test -> production" sequence it was identified; even if that's not true in exact numbers, the basic trend of escalating costs is and a developer that, on a team, leads to the team doing substantially better at identifying problems up front might get the code they directly write through the process from requirements complete to ready to test at the same speed as other developers and still be a 10x developer.)