The more I think about the "10x" idea, the less I'm sure that there's a legitimate answer that isn't an ultra-capitalist delusion. On the one hand, you have a Chosen One narrative, that employers merely need to locate the one elite worker, who will happily put in extra hours for free. On the other, you have the idea that individual workers don't matter, as long as the elite leader--teacher or manager, formal or informal--is there to guide the benighted laborers.
Is that reductive? Maybe. Is it a distortion? Probably not, since we're talking about a term used to discuss productivity to multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporations.
There's maybe one exception where I'd be comfortable using the term, but it's unsatisfying, since none of us gets to feel special: Modern tooling makes us all far more effective at our jobs. I can't put a number on it, but the libraries, frameworks, error checkers, and even coordination tools available now make it much faster and easier to create and deploy an equivalent project twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years ago.
That is, even a mediocre programmer today is (on average, assuming that they use the tools available) going to get things done faster and more reliably than even small teams working twenty years ago. Most of us--assuming that we planned out the necessary features ahead of time--could probably kick out a basic centralized social networking site in a weekend on our own. But that definitely wasn't the case in 1996, when the first sites launched. If that's not ten times, then we're all definitely working ten times faster than even the best developers writing mainframe applications in the 1970s...
So, maybe the answer to the specific question is that communities, building and improving tools and code over decades, are what make 10x developers.
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The more I think about the "10x" idea, the less I'm sure that there's a legitimate answer that isn't an ultra-capitalist delusion. On the one hand, you have a Chosen One narrative, that employers merely need to locate the one elite worker, who will happily put in extra hours for free. On the other, you have the idea that individual workers don't matter, as long as the elite leader--teacher or manager, formal or informal--is there to guide the benighted laborers.
Is that reductive? Maybe. Is it a distortion? Probably not, since we're talking about a term used to discuss productivity to multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporations.
There's maybe one exception where I'd be comfortable using the term, but it's unsatisfying, since none of us gets to feel special: Modern tooling makes us all far more effective at our jobs. I can't put a number on it, but the libraries, frameworks, error checkers, and even coordination tools available now make it much faster and easier to create and deploy an equivalent project twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty years ago.
That is, even a mediocre programmer today is (on average, assuming that they use the tools available) going to get things done faster and more reliably than even small teams working twenty years ago. Most of us--assuming that we planned out the necessary features ahead of time--could probably kick out a basic centralized social networking site in a weekend on our own. But that definitely wasn't the case in 1996, when the first sites launched. If that's not ten times, then we're all definitely working ten times faster than even the best developers writing mainframe applications in the 1970s...
So, maybe the answer to the specific question is that communities, building and improving tools and code over decades, are what make 10x developers.