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The proverbial '10x developer' is by definition an outlier tho yet people never stop arguing they don't exist.

• Dudeman112 5y ago
  I'd wager that has something to do with jumping the shark. People feel the need to chat about 10x developers when they don't even agree what a 1x developer is, and when they do present a definition, that definition is a function of (company, team, project, existing code base) which means there are more possible instances of 1x developers than the amount of developers who have ever lived. Everyone is better off if they just ditch the "10x" which has connotations that programming nerds will latch on to and just use "highly performant dudes".
• kragen 5y ago
  No, in the studies in Sackman, Erikson, and Grant's 01968 paper (10.1145/362851.362858), which is the origin of the 10x-developer idea, there were only 12 and 9 programmers, respectively. In both studies the standard deviations were comparable to the means. That means 10x developers were a substantial part of the population, and the rest of the population also has very high variance; it isn't just a question of a few outliers. Jeff Dean is probably legitimately an outlier, though.