Rockstars and 10x engineers are both real and not terribly uncommon, but often are not the same people. For the 10xer, it usually isn't that they do 10x more w

Rockstars and 10x engineers are both real and not terribly uncommon, but often are not the same people. For the 10xer, it usually isn't that they do 10x more work, it's that they know how to make their org do 1/10th the work and get essentially the same results. They pay attention to business requirements and if you spot a senior engineer being listened to very closely by the people who make business requirements you've got reasonable odds of having found one. The other type is the person who has an esoteric skill that lets you advance your business objectives by 10x-- for example, the optimization engineer who figures out how to cut server costs by 90% or whatever. These folks are usually viewed as wizards by other engineers. If you find an engineer being consistently handed all the 'crunchy' problems you've got a good candidate for this type, and again they aren't that rare. Very, very rarely the two are the same person. If you ever work with one you'll probably know it pretty quickly, but odds are low.