Most projects out there will not benefit from such a person. If you don't understand this, then in my book it makes you a poor employee. I mean, it's great if this 10x guy can solve some challenging problems that most people cannot, but if that 10x guy cannot show how it helps the business, I hope he's not in my team.
Most businesses are complex and messy. Connecting your code to business value is not easy.
Looking at some of the comments here, people are going out of their way to both defend the existence of 10x programmers, while simultaneously working very hard at not putting any kind of metric on their ability (e.g. "no, it doesn't mean they can produce 10x code or replace 10 people or ... it means <something very hard to measure>"). If you're going to insist on some quality that is hard to quantify, then stop using numbers to describe them. They are geniuses, but not 10x.
In my experience:
1. You cannot replace 10 average programmers with a 10x programmer and hope to achieve the same output. Output, by the way, is not defined by code, but by activities that help the business move forward.
2. While there are some good claimed 10x programmers who work well with others, most of the ones I've encountered do not. In my last job, we had a team of several truly brilliant folks. They could dive deep to the assembly level or work at the system level (scripting, etc). Any bottleneck that arose - they would dig deep and figure it out.
It was the least productive team I've been in. They argued amongst themselves on the pettiest of things that had no impact on the business. When asked why I was leaving the team, I literally told them that I want to be in a team that writes SW. That team's productivity was so low I couldn't reasonably claim they wrote SW. It's not that they didn't write code, but that most of it would not see the light of day because of constant bickering.
