There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

I think there are 10x developers because the vast majority are 1x.

There is no offer of proof for the claim that there are no 10x developers past claiming "they've not seen it in practice"

I have seen them with my own eyes. They are in fact, able to do things 10x faster than others. There are not a huge number of them, but they exist. At Google, folks like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are easily 10x more productive than "the baseline proficient engineer". Any proficient engineer who has worked with them can tell you the same.

Again, i won't claim there are many of these kinds of folks, but they definitely exist.

(This also doesn't mean 1/10th developers don't exist, and aren't common, but ...)

For well-defined programming tasks, I could agree that there's a standard "professional" baseline, and that, at most, other developers could be twice as good/fast, at most. (And of course, there are the 1/10 developers too, and even the "negative" developers that do more harm than good.)

But the 10x factor is real. But it comes into play, I think, more for architecture roles, or incredibly key algorithms, etc. It's a whole different beast from "proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain."

These are the developers who have the intelligence, experience, and organizational understand to make the kinds of decisions that keep a team or product running smoothly along, as opposed to getting mired in spaghetti code, rewrites, refactoring, etc. And the larger and more complex projects are, the harder this is, and the more valuable it is. And the more of an art it is, than a science.

The idea of 10x developers isn't that a single developer performs simple tasks 10x better/faster, but rather that they bring such insight into complex tasks, that they can wind up achieving 10x as much, possibly for the whole team, because they make other developers more productive as well. Or, they see a well-defined task, and see a different, better way of doing it, that only takes 1/10th the time. But the 10x is the gain they bring to the company -- and sometimes it is far greater than 10x.

You've just described a two magnitude spread between an incompetent programmer and a "rockstar" (I hate that term), with the average being a 1x programmer. I tend to believe that's true because I've seen a few 10x programmers (and I think I've had days where I have been one), but I've definitely seen 1/10x programmers. This sounds about right.

Let's say we redefine the definition of a developer to baseline at what's currently stated as 10x. What if the demand for programming far exceeds the supply of 10x devs? Fact: the above sentence isn't actually a hypothetical, it's the current state of the world.

You know what? At the end of the day, it IS harder to teach someone to fish than to fish for them. This is a known fact. This is why developing talent is an investment. You don't just get to reap the rewards from the get go. You invest and hope for a high yield. The person you let go sounded like they had great potential (wrote decent and working code, but just a little slow).

Stop being so damn arrogant.