The problem is that you can't measure a developer. So you can't say someone is 10x faster or better. If you add a bench-mark like how many LOC is written per day, most will exceed at that benchmark, but the overall quality will go down.
You can absolutely measure something.
I have a colleague going through this right now - he's got... 24 years of experience in software - mostly web - across multiple problem domains/industries. He's now on a web team with someone who's done windows desktop software for 15 years, someone else who graduated from high school 2 years ago and has never worked anywhere before, someone else who has a few years of some web experience but has never actually shipped anything remotely close to what the team is trying to do.
There's more, but... the mgt wants to treat everyone as 'equal' and having an 'equal voice'.
So... they need some new web service. "Let's use React! Let's use Dart! Let's use foo!"
Mgt: "OK - well... let's have a 'shoot out' - everyone research their ideal and we'll present findings!"
My colleague: "Hey - here's this. I got this done in a couple days - there's tests, docs, works with the existing infrastructure, and has some sample data for you to play with".
Weeks later, others: "Hey, that's not fair, you already knew some of that. I'm not an expert in $foo, but heard good things about it, and people at google use it, so we should too! I just need a few more months to get up to speed, then I can show the rest of you how good it is and why we should use it."
Someone being able to accomplish stated goals in a few days, where other people on the team are not even sure what terms to google... Yes, there are people who are "10x developers".
The term 10x engineer is generally used differently.
Though I guess the reason for terms like that might just be related to how many inexperienced people get senior level jobs.
You can measure. One way you measure is years of experience. Another can be time to deliver against a spec. Another can be number/size of defects. Another can be time to remedy defects.
Yes, it's "junior vs senior", but their management is explicitly stating "everyone's experience is relevant, and everyone has an equal voice" and so on. No, the person who has literally never contributed to a production codebase should not have an equal say in the technology stack choice. Their voice is not 'equal' to someone who has delivered consistently for 2 decades.
And... yes, it's largely bad management. He's looking to move. They had rocky mgt for... a year before, but it was tolerable. Leadership changed and my colleague stuck around the last few months to see if things would get better, but they're getting worse.
I've actually met junior 10x engineers, I could tell pretty quickly that they were better than me. I've also met senior 1/10x engineers!
Working with a junior 10x engineer is humbling.
I remember starting out at my first job, realizing I was working with people way better than me (my first office mate had 2 PhDs, IIRC Chemistry and Physics!), but slowly I climbed up the ladder of competence and became that software engineer who was doing the Really Cool Stuff.
Then, new grad joins, and he is quite obviously a full standard deviation to the right of me.
Like, shit. Sure some architect whose name is in Wikipedia, yeah they are better than me, and I've been honored to work with multiple people of that caliber, and when you work with someone whose career is regularly described as "ground breaking", you don't even try to measure up, ya know? But, when someone fresh out of college starts pumping out better code, faster, than anything I can do, just, takes a bit of mental adjustment.
Intellectually, it shouldn't be surprising, after all if there are smarter people who are older, than there are smarter people who are younger!
The one guy I am thinking of (who might be reading this, you know who you are!) is also humble, and eager to learn from everyone around him. It was a delight working with him almost a decade ago, and his career has been great since then.
Thinking about it, I don't even know where I am on the 1-100x scale. I know people who are obvious 100x developers who are the literal one of only a few dozen people in the world who can do the things that they did. During my career I have been responsible for the success of multiple projects that would've fallen to pieces w/o me, and while I was a blatant bus factor of 1. But even then, in all those projects I worked with a group of amazing developers, we all kind of brought different 10x skills to the table, if that makes sense.
Actually, when I was the Bus Factor of 1, it wasn't for my code. The handful of 10x people on the projects were turning out much better code than I ever could. My 10x contribution? I organized, lead, and figured out what code needed to be written, designed systems, and saw the interconnections between the work the various 10x+ devs were doing. My real contribution was spotting patterns, good and bad, and using that recognition to get ahead of future problems, or to organize efforts to put code in place ahead of time in anticipation of future needs.
Heck the project I'm leading right now, it started because I saw a pattern in existing work flows and I started thinking if there was a way to optimize those workflow through better usage of data structures and automation.
Maybe I'm a 10x pattern recognizer.
Where you are is dependent on the rest of the team, and the structure of the process. The notion of "X" times as a measurement implies a comparison to others. Posted elsewhere... I've been the slowest/least-productive on some teams, and I've been the 'rockstar/ninja/10x' on others - in one case, during the same time frame, just different teams.
Well, your idea is probably closer to the Marilyn Strathern definition.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
The guy doing the estimages was evaluated based on his ability to estimate accurately, so he had to inflate the estimates beyond what would be reasonable.
This was in a country with really good job protection laws....