I'm disappointed to see the 10x programmer meme hit a publication like the Economist. There's no scientific evidence of 10x differences in programmer productivity. To quote Laurent Bossavit [1], who's investigated the studies people like McConnell use:
"How strong is the support conferred to the 10x claim by the best-reputed list of references, for a reader persistent enough to follow the chain of citations back to primary sources?
"Based on our close reading of the “10x files”, we can now answer: quite weak.
"Not a single one of the references is to a replication, in the scientific sense of the term, of the original exploratory experiment.
"The empirical data is in general quite old, most if not all of it predating widespread use of the Internet - which we can safely expect to have wrought major changes in programming practice.
"None of the studies address the question of construct validity, that is, how meaningful it is to speak of an individual programmer’s productivity, and if it is meaningful, whether the experimental measurements line up adequately with that meaning."
Don't get me wrong--I've certainly seen 10x (and greater) variations in productivity. But they've been due to factors other than inherent individual capability. They're things like
* technical debt
* familiarity with the codebase and problem domain
* interruptions, distractions, multi-tasking and other office environment issues
* choice of language - but this is a distant fourth compared to other the other three
On top of all this, the Economist article is a thinly-veiled press release for tenXer, which is itself nothing more than an exercise in testerone-fueled egotism. tenXer measures activity, not productivity [2], and I expect the primary result of increasing your tenXer metrics will be less time thinking, more time hacking, and insufferable smugness.
[1] The Leprechauns of Software Engineering explores what science is and how we distinguish between fact and folklore in software engineering. It specifically explores the 10x claim, and determines that it's folklore. http://leanpub.com/leprechauns
[2] Productivity is defined as output over input, and the output of programming is software capability. No one's come up with a good measure of that yet. So any time someone claims they can prove increased productivity, ask them how they measure it. Chances are good you'll get a bogus value that measures activity instead, such as "lines of code." http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html