There are a couple ways to be called a 10x programmer. One is by doing more, by throwing around more code and building more features. This is the kind that the

There are a couple ways to be called a 10x programmer. One is by doing more, by throwing around more code and building more features. This is the kind that the article talks about. It's quite hard to maintain this kind of multiplier, no matter how much technical debt you're willing to create. I can think of one example of someone like this, and his multiplier was definitely not 10x. At the time, he was at best labelled "up-and-coming." He'd go home over the weekend and write thousands of lines of code, and then the team would come in and find everything broken. Another is by doing less, and simply being at a higher level than others. In my experience, no-one gets to 10x by just banging harder and letting other people clean up the mess. Even if you do, those aren't the people whose impact is felt for years after they leave, at least not in any positive sense. You get to 10x by being the one person who can spot the mess the rest of the team is about to create before they've written the first line. Your impact isn't felt for years by writing code: it's felt by setting the architecture, by making design decisions that constraint people into writing good code for years to come.