I totally agree that it's possible for people to produce a ton more value than others. I just think it's super rare.

In my experience it's a lot more common that I see people churning out 10x the AMOUNT of code (or some other insane metric) which generates an enormous amount of work for everyone else to keep up with, fix, maintain, understand, etc. These people are praised for their output. But are they making the TEAM 10x more productive? No way.

Prolific output doesn't always mean 10x value created. I know people know this, but I think the reason people are sick of the trope is because they've been burned by a "10x'er" that was all output, not actual value.

Producing 10x value is actually.. really, really hard.

At my work the guy who wrote pretty much all of the code can fix stuff far faster than me. But then it's not documented, not tested and he is really unhelpful at explaining it to others. Is that really a 10x engineer, when the fact others have difficult is down to the way he works?

I've worked with at least three people who were -x programmers. That is, they produced negative value to the organisation.

They did this by breaking systems (DNS, build pipelines, etc), producing code so bad that it had to be rewritten from scratch, and distracting everyone on the team through drama.

They also did it through endless requests for help - not the kind where they learn from it, though. The kind where they ask the exact same question next week of someone else. They would cycle through asking everyone on the team about the minutiae of their job, because they had no idea how to do it themselves.

I realise that the idea of the '10x rockstar' is an unpleasant one. But I also know that the best people I've worked with over the years were at least ten times better than the worst.