Whilst the simplification of the problem into a headline of 10x might be irksome to you, I think it is a symptom of a real problem. Do people accurately value

Whilst the simplification of the problem into a headline of 10x might be irksome to you, I think it is a symptom of a real problem. Do people accurately value devs. I've never seen any evidence of it. The free market doesn't really judge things on a long term quality, this problem isn't unique to software. To generalise it as "superstar devs are the most awesome" and "bad devs are useless" isn't going to help matters either. After all, we've all surely had a single line of code, which had been XP written, fully TDD with a good peer review, conducted entirely by superstars, then found it to contain a massive bug. Micro or Macro level mistakes create problems, often the mistakes are very hard to understand. Even the very best will make 'mistakes', sometimes they might be unlucky and that mistake will become very costly. If you want to talk about 10x devs, talk about understanding the value of what they do at every level. Otherwise you will have no idea what you have working for you.