10x engineering for the rest of us

The third type as described is not really a 10X engineer but a regular one that benefits from cumulative improvements. Nothing particularly special.

The actual 10X'ers usually run the group or team technically and don't get their code evaluated in the usual sense. So no they do not create a backlog of PRs.

Let me also re-iterate, the true 10X'ers are quite rare in my experience. So rare in fact that talking about them this much doesn't even make sense. They would either start companies or matter only in the context of a small company/startup. Once it gets big, again they stop mattering in the grand scheme of things in my experience.

Its easy to be a 10x-er in certain environments. Some examples and stats:

40xer: In 1 day I compressed 40 open tickets into 1 and closed it because they had the same underlying cause. My associates had no incentive but to close 1 ticket per work day.

Infinity-xer: Over the course of 3 months I uncovered the underlying model of our approach was a dead-end, short-circuiting incorrect results from being delivered to our dependent customers.

Get your head out of your ass, nobody cares about how much code gets written and very little has anything to do with the code except that it fills the domain desire.