I believe in the 10x engineer, but...

The easiest way to be a 10x engineer is to make 10 other engineers 2x more efficient. Someone can be a 10x engineer if they do nothing for 364 days then convinces the team to change programming language to a 2x more productive language.

A motivated 10x engineer in one team could be a demotivated 0.5x engineer in another team (and vice versa).

A average 1x engineer could easily become a 5x engineer if surrounded by 10x engineers. Engagement and work ethics is contagious.

The cynical reason why 10x engineers aren't paid 10x more salary is that there is no way for the new employer to know. There is no “10x badge”.

…but also, a 10x engineer can go to a new company and become an 1x engineer because of bad focus / bad engagement / tech stack mismatch.

So unfortunately there's less economic rationality for companies to pay 10x salaries to 10x engineers (contrary to what Google or Netflix says)

There's no such thing as a 10x engineer spending time on something that never ends up delivering business value. If something doesn't deliver business value, it's 0x.

If you build something that the average engineer would not have been able to build, no matter how much time, that can make you 100x or 1000x, or ∞x. Quoting Alexander Scott: There is no number of ordinary eight-year-olds who, when organized into a team, will become smart enough to beat a grandmaster in chess.

Most of the 10x factor is most likely explained by team and company factors (process, tech stack, etc) and applies to everyone in the team/company. Intra-team variation is thus much smaller than 10x (even controlling for the fact that companies tend to attract people of equal caliber). Nature vs nurture…

I've never met the legendary “10x jerk”. Anecdotally the outperforming engineers are generally nice and humble.

Don't get hung up on the exact numbers here, it's just for illustration purposes. I.e. someone introduced a bug in the trading system of Knight Capital that made them lose $465M in 30 minutes. Did that make it a -1,000,000x engineer? (and btw it had more to do with company culture). The numbers aren't meant to be taken literally.

I got a unique photo opportunity of this small group of 10x engineers until they suddenly vanished. All I managed to hear was “Merkle trees” and “Kappa architecture”. What are the meanings of those expressions? We will never know.