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1/ Many people claim "10x engineers" don't exist. Of course they do. The problem is that most engineers think they are 10x, or 5x, or 2x, when they aren't. That annoys everyone around them.
2/ Everybody wants to be measured according to their strengths. Thus, they claim "I write 2x the amount of code therefore I'm a 2x engineer". But their coworkers recognize this engineer's code is half (0.5x) the quality, that others have to spend their valuable time fixing.
3/ In highly political engineering organizations, pretty much every engineer is promoting their strengths, while their peers recognize their weaknesses, and thus you have this hatred of anybody claiming to be 'x' above them.
4/ But the reality is that some engineers produce both 2x quantity of code AND 2x the quality of code. It's more common than you think: if you are spending less time debugging your code, you'll have more time to write code.
5/ There are other skills as well. For example, on one project, an engineer said "we can't solve that because that would require assembly language". It would require 5 lines off inline assembly. Some engineers are blocked by this, some engineers aren't.
6/ Understanding the underlying assembly, or underlying byte-code or intermediate representation, adds another 'x' to your quiver. Most engineers don't, the few who do deserve recognition for it.
7/ Then there is subject matter expertise. Most engineers tasked with, for example, accounting software, know nothing of accounting. Some engineers when giving such a task learn accounting. This adds more 'x's to your rating than probably anything else.
8/ All those 'x's are multiplicative, exponential: O(cⁿ). This quickly reaches 10x. Of course, your faults work the same way, dragging you down just as quickly.
9/ So again we are back to politically toxic engineering organizations where individuals can list their strengths and their peers unhappy that the individual doesn't recognize their weaknesses.
