The "10x programmer" myth is a fallacy that boosts the rat-race mentality in programmers, believing you need to be able to solve problems with quick hacks in order to be considered "a good progreammer". But the problem is: productivity is not a constant. It's more like a tide, when it comes, it comes strong, but then it fades and you can't do anything about that. Unless you're a robot. Also, engineering is that fancy field, that often gets overly excited about short-term wins, loosing the track of the bigger picture — one programmer can do something in 15 minutes, using lots of poorly designed hacks, without any optimisation or deeper thought, which will come back to bite very soon; and another programmer might take few hours, making a solution that will be rock-solid even after some time. The short-term "productivity" is in favour of the 1st one, but in reality the 2nd one is more productive in the long run.