I think the question of 10x engineers is actually ill-defined. There are developers I can consistently outperform by a factor of ten, do in half a day what they

I think the question of 10x engineers is actually ill-defined. There are developers I can consistently outperform by a factor of ten, do in half a day what they spent an entire week on and end up with a better solution. They are not necessarily fresh out of school but somehow managed to survive year after year even though they don't even know the language they are developing in. And I don't mean the ugly details of the memory model but basics for professional developers like generics or interfaces. But what does that proof? I think nobody doubts that the difference between a bad developer and a good one can be a factor of ten or more. Outperforming a good developer by a factor of ten is a totally different story. It is certainly possible if you have some good insight, if you spot some non-obvious structure in the problem that you can exploit to make your life a lot easier. But doing this consistently is probably at least a rear feat. So the question is to whom do we compare our 10x engineer candidates? The average one maybe, but the average of what? Your team, your company, the entire industry? I would argue that the age respectively experience structure is really important. When you begin you learn a programming language but it takes some time until you really learn programming, until you reach the point that the languages no longer matters and you are able to focus on mapping your problems to more abstract concepts and typing it out in some language becomes the boring but necessary part of your work.