If you want good coders look for resumes with startup experience. You don't survive as a senior developer at a startup without being being able to write code under pressure.
If you want someone who can glue various systems while cross communicating to various stakeholders look for someone at a larger company.
If you want both, look for both sets of experience on the resume.
People with 10+ will filter out positions that won't succeed at better than you can filter them out.
Lots of code that's written under pressure isn't good code. It's code that barely works and is hard to maintain. For a startup that's trying to get an MVP out quickly (and may not be around in a couple of years), that may be just what they need. But a huge company like Google needs developers who can write software that's reliable, performs well and is maintainable for years after the original developer is gone.
* I think the actual factor is higher, but I think most people would agree to a factor of 2 without much debate.
There are definitely 10x (and even 100x) engineers, but throw five 10x engineers together and you will get substantially less than 50x results. There's always mundane but time consuming shit that can best be handled by a 1x.
And a bigger issue is that no company can hire a team of 10x engineers, because it's very expensive, 10x engineers are relatively rare, and dedicating more resources to the interview process gets diminishing returns in terms of identifying and hiring them. Not even companies with effectively infinitely deep pocketbooks manage to succeed at that.
It's best to design systems optimized for the 1x case, focus a lot on avoiding the -1x candidates, and grab the exceptional candidates opportunistically when you get the chance, usually by working outside the process. Which seems to be what the industry has defaulted to.
Hell, even for the interviews, some people cheat one way or another. But it's at least harder to do that than to make up stuff on your resume.
