I think the 10x thing is about perception, I worked with Principal Engineers at AWS who designed products used by millions, and now similarly at Google, and they just have a ton of experience in a niche area and can leverage that well, with excellent communication skills and vision, but they are not 10x , i would say 1.5x at best. Now, if you think the senior guy on your team is a 10x-er because he knows all the little tricks of Ruby on Rails, or is parroting Martin Fowler non stop, or is the type of person who leave 20 comments in a PR about spacing , code style, etc... then yeah sure, each person can believe whatever. If you want to make the case the true best of the best don't come to FAANG, then I really dunno what to tell you. And regarding your analogy about other areas of life, software is different, software is not a single player game. And lastly, I don't care really, I worked with brilliant people on products used by millions, I feel lucky to work with them, and they too think the 10x engineer thing is a myth.