> I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others jus

> I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. I always thought of 10x as a qualitative description, not quantitative. There are certain inflection points where the wrong decision can cause a 10x amount of time to be wasted. One person might have the correct (but counter-intuitive) insight about whether building vs. buying is the right move for a given project. (For example.) Everyone else on the team disagrees and goes with the more obvious choice, which becomes a disaster of a project. So I see 10x as more about wisdom and strategy, not doing 10x the work. It's not always such an large and obvious inflection point, it can be a single algorithm that can be done simply with little code or in just the opposite way. The right approach can reduce the complexity and code by 10x over time as the bugs go down, the maintenance goes down, etc. These things add up, and over time a project under one person's leadership can easily end up with 10x the complexity, bugs, etc. for needless reasons that someone else might have avoided. I have no doubt that the gap in value from the best developer to the average (let alone the worst) can span 10x over time.