>> it blows my mind to think there's a large number of people out there who in just a few hours could knock out everything I spent all of last week on.
First of all, as I wrote in the post, 10x programmers are rare. There isn't a "large number" of them.
Second, it's not about producing more lines of code per minute or per week. It's about producing the maximum value (for lack of a better word) in a time period by making good decisions.
I'm not a 10x programmer and the results on my own work week are pretty obvious: when I look at it closely, I realize that I spend a lot of time dealing previous mistakes. I lose days because I made a solution that's too tightly coupled and it's hard to adapt the code to a new situation; I didn't add enough tests and waste lots of time fixing regressions; I didn't add enough documentation and can't remember why I made certain decisions; I've created designs that don't scale and need to be replaced entirely; and so on. Since it's harder to read code than to write it[1] and since the cost of fixing defects increases dramatically later in the software process[2], these bad decisions eat up an enormous amount of time.
However, as I learn more, I've noticed that I spend a much higher proportion of my time solving the "real" business problem instead of dealing with previous mistakes. In other words, I'm becoming dramatically more productive than I used to be, not because I'm typing faster, but because I'm avoiding/reducing entire branches of work that used to eat up my time.
These sorts of effects multiply: for the 10x programmer, the gain in productivity can be huge and they will be able to get an order of magnitude more done than the average coder.
* [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html * [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing#Economics