[parennoob]

This 10x rhetoric sincerely needs to stop, now. Recently, I have seen it creep into instruction manuals for program managers who have never written a line of code in their lives. "How to incentivize people to become 10x Developers" and suchlike.

Promote this meme much further, and essentially you will all be expected to do 10 times the amount of work you do because some mythical construct apparently does.

[Note: this does not mean that there aren't some people who contribute substantially more than others -- they definitely do exist. Just a prediction that putting the number 10 on it is going to lead the beancounters into massive numerical fallacies about the productivity advantages of such people.]

[DougWebb]

"How to incentivize people to become brilliant musicians"

"How to incentivize people to become world-renown artists"

"How to incentivize people to become best-selling authors"

"How to incentivize people to become Nobel laureates"

Yeah, none of those work. Why would program managers expect it to work for software developers?

On the other hand, there's probably a lot of money to be made in writing a series of books with those titles. They'd be utter garbage, but I'd bet they'd sell well.

[marcosdumay]

Very few people manage musicians, artists, authors, and scientits.

Lots and lots of people manage programmers.

[whatthefox]

I agree with you 100%. Sure, there are 10x programmers just like there are 10x lawyers, politicians, analysts, doctors, nurses, teachers, administrators etc. They are good because A. they like what they do (10K hours rule and all that ...) and B. their personality/intelligence is in-line with their profession of choice. You cannot teach or mentor someone to become 10x in their field. Fortunately, not everyone needs such ground breaking abilities. Just a few are good enough. The rest of us will do just fine by showing up, doing good work, collecting our pay-check and go live a good life (defined by the individual).