Talent is real but software companies are useless at selecting for it. Perhaps they're not actually interested in talent. They don't want talented developers, t

Talent is real but software companies are useless at selecting for it. Perhaps they're not actually interested in talent. They don't want talented developers, they want compliant employees who will do exactly what their superior tells them to do no matter what the ethical implications are. I'm a >10x developer in the sense that I've produced better, more reliable, more scalable systems on my own than a typical team of 10+ senior developers working at a large company in the same amount of time. But even that's trivializing it because it would be impossible for that team to match the quality of my work no matter how much time you gave them. That said, I think most people could become a 10x or even 100x developer if they wanted and worked hard, but the problem is that there is no motivation for anyone to do it because companies don't want to hire them anyway. Most people only do things for money so they're not going to waste energy on trying to achieve mastery of the subject. If anything, it's more profitable to work slow and increase the system's complexity to give yourself more work. Making yourself just competent enough to convince your idiot boss to let you keep your job but not so competent that you ever run out of things to fix. Nobody cares about who the best developers in the world are... On the other hand, everybody in the world is interested to know who is the best at kicking a ball inside a net, hitting a ball with a stick, who can jump the highest with the help of a really long stick, ... The closest attempts at identifying coding talent are hackathons but they're a joke because 2 days is not enough time to judge someone's talent. Coding is more like a marathon; unless you're a really good developer yourself, it will take years to evaluate someone's skill. Unfortuantely, big companies have hardly any good developers.