10x programmers exist, but often it doesn’t matter. The only way one programmer is 10x better than the median of a team of solidly educated peers is in the very few extraordinarally difficult problems that require something like real genius. If there’s someone on a team doing 10x more average code than his or her peers it’s by avoiding other work that isn’t being tracked as carefully. Also, people who write less new code than others are often contributing above average on things like writing bug reports and doing thorough code reviews. FWIW I’m basing this mostly on real data from a multi year project.