10x engineer is the most atrocious bullshit I have heard about. It can be only said by people who are not developers. I don't believe there is a meaning behind 10x programmer.
If you talk purely about coding throughput, I know quite a few. Ayende Rahien/Oren Eini being one. That guy does most complex shit you can imagine, and does it well and fast.
If you talk about an 10x in any profession, You can see that in many walks of life, not just engineering. On many occasions, people find ways to do 10x impact with 1x work. It can be closing a large sales, it can be avoid doing 6 months of work by 50 people by pulling 5 people for 3 month and approaching the problem much differently. Or it can be acting as a force multiplier by building tools to do grunt work etc.
So yes, 10x exists. even 50x probably possible to find, you need to stop thinking about 10x lines of code and start thinking about 10x impact. That can be your way to get to 10x.
Knowing and mastering your tool chain, language, editor infrastructure etc intimately; can have tremendous productivity gains. Having zero personal life also helps tremendously.
Features and products just flow out of you.
Personally I found having a family has many benefits, but I also lost that edge. Health issues also take away a lot.
Kids getting old enough to not require constant attention is allowing me to regain some of that.
(Some, but not all, were also abrasive personalities who didn't work well in teams.)
The only genuine 10x programmer I have ever met was the nicest, most humble guy you could imagine. He didn’t just crank out code, he saw patterns in things that no one else could until he pointed them out, and then it seemed obvious because he explained it so well.
But I have met many 1.1x programmers who act like the worst stereotypes of a 10x, and when the dust settles and someone has to maintain their rockstar code they have the net effect of a 0.1x.
Having to do so is a drag on everyone else's productivity. If it's bad enough, you'll end up also having to deal with a higher turnover - another productivity drag. Is all this a still a net gain?
If it's the spread between median and max, then it's easy to sympathize with it being true. The median startup has 0 or negative economic contribution. Similarly, there's a lot of programmers that create tech debt or low value, so 10x that isn't so outrageous.
What about CEOs? Whats the difference between a median CEO and the best CEO ever? That's got to be way more than 10x.
Like "rock star" or "ninja," this concept needs to die.
In the NY Times article about it, some of the reader comments was "NYC should hire this guy!" or "He should come work for the city!".
To which people more familiar with SWEs replied "that will never happen, he probably makes several times what a government (or gov contracted) SWE makes, and that's why he can do this while the government team cannot."