I thought I originally heard about the 10x programmer thing from some of Chuck Moore's talks on Forth. So I went to re-find this article. But as it turns out

I thought I originally heard about the 10x programmer thing from some of Chuck Moore's talks on Forth. So I went to re-find this article. But as it turns out he was arguing against 10x complexity and advocating avoiding abstractions with "1x" coding. http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm