Its basically a form of the fundamental attribution error. Instead of looking at the properties of the person, we would often be better to identify the tasks th

Its basically a form of the fundamental attribution error. Instead of looking at the properties of the person, we would often be better to identify the tasks themselves as having the potential range 1x-10x. Some tasks admit a narrow band but others (with many bear traps and possible shortcuts) have a broad range. The actual productivity is the fitness of the developer to the task and not a property of the developer. This "fitness" is how well their skills, their set of learned intuitions, personal characteristics e.g. courage vs. caution etc. fit the given problem which can be sheer luck. This lets us realise that a great developer can have experience that has trained intuitions that actually work against them for a given task and avoid the nasty labelling of them as "they are not a 10x developer". That said, intelligence and focus are common attributes that undeniably elevate the baseline significantly but by how much? If only we had a way to quantify productivity to test this stuff.