It’s a bell curve and eventually you’ll meet someone on the farther ends of both sides.
Chances are there’s always someone much better or much worse than you.
I very, very strongly doubt that. That's just not how human performance works. There is a lot of variation for sure, but not by arbitrarily high amounts.
Instead, there is a maximum humanly achievable performance, and the performance of individuals varies between zero and that value.
As a trivial example, the world champion in weightlifting doesn't lift 10x as much as the average person – and they certainly don't lift 10x as much as other professional weightlifters. In most fields, the world's top performers are a few percentage points better than the average professional.
I consider any software engineer who performs just twice as well as the average engineer to be part of the elite. And I consider claims of "10x" performance to be complete and utter bullshit concocted by people who have no idea what they are talking about.
I know plenty of software developers who can solve bugs or design systems that the average developer would never be able to do. Those people are infinitely better at those tasks than the average.
10x performance is easy as long as you do not constrain it to something inane. Impact and the ability to solve problems that others can not are functional and practical examples of that.
And he isn't even 10X faster!
I am not physically active at all, and the world record for weightlifters in my weight class is around 3 times what I am able to lift with zero training.
Of course it does. The “10x developer” claim is that some people have 150+ kg equivalent brains when it comes to programming. In the right environment they’re lifting 10x more code. Just like with weightlifting, it might not be healthy or useful to compare your productivity to theirs because it hurts and it doesn’t really matter anyway. But just like with weightlifting, the comparison can still be made.
Most of us work with other people in our “intellectual weight class” - so you might not meet many developers that much smarter than you. But they’re out there. The Jeff Deans of this world aren’t spending their time closing jira tickets for simple web apps.
Software development on a team is more than bashing code; a 10× developer is probably most often a 3× coder who helps makes seven 1× teammates into 2× coders.
It's going to be abused and stretched and misread and taken overly literally until it breaks.
Even a 0.1x engineer can do that, though it may take a little longer.
10x just refers to those top performers for sake of discussion. The point is not the semantics.
When you get the top, differences are more perception and other factors over skill/knowledge/intelligence. See: The Olympics, do you often see an Olympic competitor 10x a competitor?
Yes, the Olympics mostly consists of 10X athletes. It’s pretty much a competition made for them.
The world record for 100 meters sprint is 9.58 seconds. High school athletes routinely break 11 seconds. There are one-legged people, 90-year-olds, and other highly handicapped individuals who have come within a factor of 2 of the world record set by elite professional athletes. 10x my ass.
The truth is that the gap between average and peak human performance is actually rather modest, and this is reflected by hard numbers wherever they are available. There is no need to invoke 10x ubermensch nonsense.
To show how ridiculous that idea is, that would make "average" 100 meters sprint times more than 1.5 minutes, and "average" long jump distances less than 1 meter.
Where absolute performance is concerned (that is, performance measured against an external, objective standard), no elite athlete in any sport is anywhere close to 10x'ing their hobbyist peers. Even beating them by a factor of 2 is unthinkable in most sports.