It's not really a strawman considering it's EXACTLY what most companies are trying to do: make programmers fungible across domains. Critically; they're doing this because they typically have no visibility into these skillsets from the managerial level, and they typically only have one or two programmers "in a given domain" on a team - even in a very, very large company. The company would like to pretend these people are fungible, and can be interchangeably swapped out, but the reality is they have no immediately replacements on the team.

There's no sense in doing an apples-to-apples comparison when you've only got one apple, an orange, and a pear.

Of course it is subjective. This is literally what you said:

> That is my definition.

You obviously care about optimizing for salary expenses. Most companies have room to hire more people who can do a few things well, so their definition of 10x would be different because they’ll have different expectations of their employees.

And really, if your definition of a 10xer is some poor fool who’s willing to take the job of 10 people for a single person’s salary, good luck finding someone who wants to spend their lives living that way.

So y’all don’t disagree with the main point.

There are some specific individual engineers who will get a specific individual task, faster than some other specific engineers.

If those same specific engineers get done many general tasks faster than another group of specific engineers on general tasks than they are just better in general. If some other specific task gets done by the other specific engineers better then it is just different domains.

Either way the individuals matter.