To be fair, you're the one bringing up the 10x engineer. The article only mentions it for the sake of contrasting it with -10x engineers: "+10x engineers may be

To be fair, you're the one bringing up the 10x engineer. The article only mentions it for the sake of contrasting it with -10x engineers: "+10x engineers may be mythical, but -10x engineers exist." And that's all that was said about it. I agree that arguments for and against are tiring, so let's talk about the article instead! I've definitely seen engineers who have been net negative in productivity. They've distracted me from my work, introduced bugs that have had severe effects on the production environment, and have produced code that had to be thrown away and completely rewritten. Luckily, the items in the article aren't commonly seen all in one person, but they are great ways to lose productivity and negatively affect others in the company.