10x is about more than just the person. Skill, experience, and project/person fit also matter. I'm a bona fide 10xer but I'm not going to be "10x" under every p

10x is about more than just the person. Skill, experience, and project/person fit also matter. I'm a bona fide 10xer but I'm not going to be "10x" under every possible context. Let's say you're a Ruby shop and you hire me (I've never used Ruby). Now, I've used Clojure, Python, and a little bit of Node. So I'll pick Ruby up quickly, and probably be very good within a couple of months. But you're not going to be happy if I'm working 4 hours per week during that on-boarding process and using 10x as an excuse. A two-month onboarding period is acceptable; 20 months is not. Like a "ten-year overnight success", 10x requires a lot of skill and investment to get there, and the vast majority of people do not (and can not) get there on a 4-hour work week. It might be that only ~4 hours are critical to learning, but there's a whole search process involved in finding what is worth learning and how to learn it. You have to work a lot harder to get to the point where you're a legit 10xer. This is the proverbial "10,000 hours"-- there's a lot of variation by individuals and projects, but no doubt in my mind that that's the right order of magnitude. Full-time employment is becoming a dinosaur, over time, and even more clunky is the expectation of full loyalty (no side projects, no competing interests, minimal support for education) that employers tend to expect. So I'm not taking the other side, so much as I think it's unreasonable to make the argument that 10x can be divorced from the very hard work it takes to get (and stay) there. I would argue in favor of compensating 10xers better (5x instead of 1.2x) or giving them a lot more autonomy (so they can continue investing in their skills, but aren't expected to invest more than 4 hours into assigned work) but at that point, you're talking about sociological issues-- why aren't the best people rewarded or even recognized?-- and that's a different can of mud.