>The programming community is extremely polarized about the existence or not of such a beast
If we go meta and generalize the disagreement, the skepticism about "10X" is the same as the rejection of other labels such as "ninja" and "rockstar".[1] For some, the idea of categorizing a subset of programmers with a grandiose label is psychologically distasteful. It doesn't matter what the label is; any label that attempts to stratify programmers is a "myth".
As for "10x" specifically, I'll repeat what I've written before...
To make peace with the "10x" label, I suggest people just think of it as a rhetorical figure-of-speech instead of a rigorous mathematical term. We don't get hung up when people say "Star Wars IV was 10 times better than Phantom Menace" or "I'm not even 1/2 the football player I used to be."
Even if people were to use a new term such as "3-Sigma Programmer"[2] instead of "10X Programmer", the ensuing debates would still be the same.
E.g. "Some people say 3-σ programmers write string parsing loops that are better in speed and quality than 99.7% of the other loops but that 3-standard-deviations-above-the-mean is a myth... etc"
The argument pattern would be the same: take a label, any label, hyperfocus on some literal meaning to the exclusion of all other colloquial usage, and debate why that mathematical interpretation fails in the real world.
tldr: "10x" in discussions is more of an informal ranking of programmer ability and not a rigorous mathematical measurement of output.
Not many people would take issue with the statement that Shakespeare was 10x better / more effective than the average playwright. If you consider that both are creative processes there seems no reason to reject the idea that a programmer could be 10x more effective than his peers.
The comparison between writing a play or a program starts to break down if the problem space is narrow, as the article also mentions, so a lot of what people end up arguing about is what programming actually is.
If publishers decided they were only going to publish Shakespeares, I imagine a multitude of authors would squander a great deal of ink over it, and we'd all be worse off for the cumulative waste of talent.
If we go meta and generalize the disagreement, the skepticism about "10X" is the same as the rejection of other labels such as "ninja" and "rockstar".[1] For some, the idea of categorizing a subset of programmers with a grandiose label is psychologically distasteful. It doesn't matter what the label is; any label that attempts to stratify programmers is a "myth".
As for "10x" specifically, I'll repeat what I've written before...
To make peace with the "10x" label, I suggest people just think of it as a rhetorical figure-of-speech instead of a rigorous mathematical term. We don't get hung up when people say "Star Wars IV was 10 times better than Phantom Menace" or "I'm not even 1/2 the football player I used to be."
Even if people were to use a new term such as "3-Sigma Programmer"[2] instead of "10X Programmer", the ensuing debates would still be the same.
E.g. "Some people say 3-σ programmers write string parsing loops that are better in speed and quality than 99.7% of the other loops but that 3-standard-deviations-above-the-mean is a myth... etc"
The argument pattern would be the same: take a label, any label, hyperfocus on some literal meaning to the exclusion of all other colloquial usage, and debate why that mathematical interpretation fails in the real world.
tldr: "10x" in discussions is more of an informal ranking of programmer ability and not a rigorous mathematical measurement of output.
[1]https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheMythOfTheRockstarProgramme...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation