Bit of an aside, but writing an email is its own art. Not many developers know how to write an email that a busy, non-technical VP will read, understand and act on in the way they intended. (Then again, neither do many managers.)

I'm not mixing - as I wrote, many more are not famous, but their impact is similar. When discussing abstract concepts, it helps to have concrete examples of that phenomena. Using "famous" people is a shortcut to define a shared definition for what "10x" might look like.

And yes, there are "10x" teachers, investors, lawyers, storytellers, sales folks, etc. Similarly, the distribution of talent that helps with "software development" might have a very long tail, leading to extraordinary performance versus the median.

IF 10x exist, some will be popular and most won’t. Obviously he won’t know the obscure ones or pick examples you can’t relate to. So while he didn’t prove his point perhaps, perhaps you didn’t disprove his either. :)

How long would it have taken you or me to write Doom, or Quake? How long would it have taken Carmack, if it'd just been him?

I think you have a false dichotomy here. Carmack isn't 10x better a C or assembly than me. But in his domain he's easily 10x smarter and more productive than me.

And on top of that, he has a quarter century more experience in graphics programming than me. That shit accumulates.

Yes, actually. In graphics programming, from 2D and software rendered, to OpenGL and VR, you could give him and me (and presumably you) any task achievable in a few human decades, and he'd do it more than 10x faster.

"Graphics programming" is not a small niche, and yes in that space he's a 10x programmer.

I think you're thinking of this the wrong way. I agree that for something as simple as "build some websites", yeah, 10x is going to be very hard. You're then just turning specs into code, pretty much.

10x programmers are those that don't waste 9 months. The hard part is knowing which 9 months out of 10, which 9 ideas and components out of 10, is waste.

For "build a web forum" or something, yeah there are no 10x programmers. Though there are many many 0.1x programmers still.

There is no "10X" touch-typist because a) the performance limit is absolute & relatively low and b) the learning curve is such that it's easy to get to the limit and plateau. Now let's increase complexity - still typing, but you must translate the text from another language. Increase again - now you're translating poetry. Increase again - the poetry is original Shakespeare. You need to translate into contemporary English approachable to Gen Z, as a script for a TikTok short, referencing memes from current events. There is no doubt that some people will have a combination of talents - in language, typing, copywriting, built-up cultural knowledge, lived experiences - that will make them 10X in such jobs.

The more software development work approaches touch-typing, the less difference between 1x and 10X — strict Jira tickets in, garbage out, maybe slightly faster. Spec-work, and most grunt-work, is undifferentiated and does not benefit from a 10X person. The more your work approaches poetry - such as exercising user empathy, improving the architecture, considering UX, respecting performance constraints, understanding user's jobs to be done, and improving your implementation around that - the more creative space there is for 10X to reveal itself.

That definition is too narrow. How about this one: can someone work for 1 year and (consistently) produce 10x more value for their organization than the median engineer? This seems transparently true if you've worked in any large organization.

> some niche use case that only one guy understands

But that's where all the value is! Step 1 of being an exceptional worker is not to do unexceptional work if you can at all avoid it.

> at least if we read it literally

This is where it does fall down. There isn't an X that you can reliably measure 10 of, it's all very subjective.