>The article goes on to suggest that there are "1000x" engineers who can do things other engineers cannot do.
It's a very easy statement to make but really hard to prove. I will probably never write a solid OS kernel, but I'm also not going to spend 5 years trying to learn all of the concepts and hard-won knowledge just to prove that I can when I really don't want to be doing it in the first place. Especially when you can back out of that original argument by saying "Oh, well you were 10x, you just didn't know it".
I also haven't read too much about career progression for engineers which plays into all of this, i.e., what percentage of 10x should I be after 6 months? 1 year? 5? 10? What skills should I possess on that career timeline? The answer right now is pretty much open-ended.