[doctorwho]

Some people are just better at exploring problem spaces, avoiding dead ends and making insightful connections that lead to solutions. It doesn't always come with experience, some people could work forever and never solve even a moderately difficult problem. These people build websites. The 10x engineer has a mindset and an approach that yields results more consistently than his/her peers.

[ericxtang]

Very true. Engineers like that are extremely rare, and usually have serious golden handcuffs. However, there are a lot more people with similar mindset but limited programming experience. With the right culture, those are the usually the people who can make a big different at a startup.