As for the whole 10x programmer debacle... well it all depends really. Are there people who are better at programming in general? Sure. But there are also plen

As for the whole 10x programmer debacle... well it all depends really. Are there people who are better at programming in general? Sure. But there are also plenty of people who just seem like that because the company they work for demands less than their full expertise. The same dev who's a '1x dev' at Google or Facebook or Apple might be a '10x dev' at a small web development agency, and a '100x dev' at a business which doesn't specialise in software engineering at all. And the same goes in reverse. Point is, the environment and how well your practices gel with those of the team/company have a huge effect on how productive you are, as do numerous other factors. It's basically the whole 'nature vs nurture' thing really, and both aspects play a role in how skilled a dev anyone is.