Honestly I’ve met real 10x programmers.

Well, speaking honestly probably more like 5x, but it would take a solid 5 person team working well together to do the same things he did.

His ability to reason about the problem- get to the root of the persons actual issue, proof of concept intitial revision and iterate until it was better quality than most popular open source projects was honestly awe inspring.

His only problem was his own lack of self confidence. He used tools and always asked if they were really the best or if he was inflicting them, had good reasons for not using things that we consider industry standard (he prefers restructured text over markdown because it’s more expressive, for example) but was ultimately very sad about every project he made because he felt like he had inflicted his (good) work on the world.

So, idk. The people who think they are rockstars probably not. He definitely didn’t think he was but he was a god to me.

Disclaimer: I feel strongly about this. However, if you have a strong other opinion, then I applaud you and I'd be curious to read it. Rationally, I don't think this term matters a lot as there are better terms to describe programmers, but emotionally it's tied too much to a friend of mine and that's what makes me feel so strongly about it.

> The problem with that definition is that it tags the coveted 10x label onto the problematic cases mentioned in the article: that guy who is able to hack together POC code that he demos and passes off as the solution, but requires a whole team to fix and to rewrite and to rearchitect to get it to actually work and be production-ready and be maintainable.

As I said in another comment. I've met one 10x programmer. So I consider him to be the archetype 10x programmer since he's the only visible proof I have. We're good friends, we mostly talk about life. I sometimes see him code. Let me assure you, he is the last guy that would hack together POC code. I know this, because I'd be one of the first to do that and he gives me a lot of flack for that when I show it to him xD

I should have left out the "or" in my definition. He knows how to architect, he knows how to code, he micro-optimizes every nano, is capable of understanding how underlying ISAs are doing their thing. He knows how to reason well. At companies where he'd enter as a junior, he was immediately recognized for having better technical skills than people 10+ years their senior (note: not his social skills, those are simply normal).

They exist. And it's easy to see why 10x programmers exist. Take a bell curve of ability and you find many 10x'ers on many scales of ability.

Or would you argue that people like Einstein was not a 10x physicist, or that Euler wasn't a 10x mathematician? And there are many more that I wouldn't even know of.

10x programmer is very related to the idea of a genius, in my opinion. It's simply a subset of it.

Feel free to disagree. It's good to see other perspectives.

If their code isn't running in production with little maintenance required then they didn't actually produce the thing. Just add that requirement and it becomes clear.