> Or, they cannot really appreciate the quality or even the speed of my work. Clueless people abound.
Many "10x programmers" aren't anywhere near 10x faster/better/etc in an environment full of 1x programmers. I think "exponential" would be a better description than 10x. If you watch them in the short term they look similar to the 1x programmers. If you distribute their exponential gains over the whole team then this will always be true. These types are like successful hedge fund managers in the domain of technical investment and debt. If you let them work alone long enough you'll start to see their foresight paying dividends.
I think you can easily be a 10x developer, since 10x is relative. Especially in a world awash in bad developers. Just being familiar with the right algorithms and software approaches vis-a-vis your co-workers will do that. I've seen "enterprise" code that was doing tons of string key-value pair lookups using arrays. Just converting those to hashtables could very well speed up the app by 10+ times if the key-value lookups were the bottleneck. I can imagine a poorly performing database program being sped up by 10 times just by having the right person refactor the code to use caching to avoid database reconnections. This is what I think of when I think of a 10x developer; they may not be literally 10x better but their code can be 10x faster or use 1/10th the memory or be 1/10 the size of competing developers.
Your comment is totally reasonable. You're being down-voted because the sentiment of that statement is so negative but in some ways it's true. There is widespread encouragement from society for individuals to learn how to program. In the last 5 decades the group that operates primarily from this motivation has exploded. The much older fanatical nerd group (originating with Charles Babbage himself) has seen more modest growth. This latter group operates primarily from intrinsic motivation. They would have an earnest desire to achieve the improvements you've stated. Simply to see if they can. Their love for their craft and overall playful orientation eventually accumulates. They quickly familiarize themselves with the whole bag of tricks. They have wet dreams about things like binary search. You just can't compete with someone who loves what they do. The more monetary incentive there is to do something the more those people are few and far between. So yes, I agree that the phenomenon is relative and that it is so extreme (10x) mostly because so many developers are merely "good enough" (1x). I still think there's a lot to be said about how much an environment enables the expression of a 10x programmer. It is most common that "good enough" really is good enough and going extreme doesn't make anything better.
I have no problem speaking of bad developers because I myself was one. Now, I am probably above average and in some organizations maybe even a "10x" developer. But I shudder thinking of some of the code samples that I've sent to prospective employers in my earlier days (~12 years ago) -- code that I thought was good and clever. Probably most junior developers are bad and I suspect a lot more code gets written by junior developers than we'd like to think. The senior developers get to work on the interesting problems and they leave the necessary but boring coding work to the junior developers.
I was also a bad developer. Then I was a "clever" developer. Then I was rewriting everything from nothing because I needed to know how it worked. Doing so is a great way to get a sense of how much "secret sauce" there is in a domain. The C++ standard library has a lot for instance. My naive implementations never came close.
> I suspect a lot more code gets written by junior developers than we'd like to think.
This may be true if you just measure lines of code. But if you couple that measure with the number of times each line was actually executed I suspect you'd see a different story. My library, for example, was comparable in size to parts of the standard library it replaced. So by direct measure a junior developer wrote half the code. But when you measure it by usage you can see the magnificent results of the 10x programmers at Boost and otherwise working on the C++ standard library. Notably their 10x-ness is in the performance of their code and not their performance on the job. Like you described.
People with experience in the field have been telling me I am a very good programmer. I always compare myself to the car mechanic who holds a screwdriver to the engine, puts his ear on it, and immediately hears that the third valve needs replacement.
That's a really nice hierarchy. I'd argue a 10x business value developer is a 10x technical developer AND a 10x product designer. Also that a 10x manager is a 10x business value developer AND a 10x leader/coordinator. The rarity compounds with the number of passions that must converge on a single individual. I'd bet you get a bit of a bump with a partial set. So a 10x technical developer may be able to operate as a 2x business value developer without significant product design skill. A 6x manager may get by with average technical ability.
I'm not sure how much the 10x thing generalizes. I still think it's a terrible name. I sort of gave an argument for why programming ability may have a bimodal distribution. With one half growing and eventually eating the other. I don't necessarily see that same phenomenon in leadership or product design. That is assuming you're looking at people who are actually trying and not just random technical developers.
Many "10x programmers" aren't anywhere near 10x faster/better/etc in an environment full of 1x programmers. I think "exponential" would be a better description than 10x. If you watch them in the short term they look similar to the 1x programmers. If you distribute their exponential gains over the whole team then this will always be true. These types are like successful hedge fund managers in the domain of technical investment and debt. If you let them work alone long enough you'll start to see their foresight paying dividends.