This article makes the persistent assumption that any graduate is the same as any other engineer.
Having worked for a whole bunch of companies over the past few years, one thing is a constant in the tech industry: there is a limitless supply of candidates for any given job, all of which are bad. It is a huge, challenging problem to find the small number of people you want to hire. I'm not sold that "10x developers" really exist, but I know that "0x developers" are plentiful: these candidates aren't just a "poor fit", they are entirely unable to do the job they're applying for. I've seen far too many graduates who are entirely unable to solve the most basic screening questions, and just don't seem able to write code.
In a similar vein, it is entirely reasonable for a company to be simultaneously cutting jobs and hiring, if they are cutting persistent underperformers and trying to hire more promising replacements. (Some legal fiction is necessary to do this in the current regulatory environment)
If only those bad developers were "0x developers", it would have been the problem of spending money on their salaries. In reality there are many "-10x developers" which may increase the costs for maintaining the software, or cause a lot of performance problems with the results of their work.
Something I've thought a lot about at my current job is the relative nature of the 10x engineer. Half of the developers on my team consistently require over a week to accomplish tasks that would take me half of a day. That's a 10x difference. Some of these people have several more years of experience than I do. Everyone has over five years of experience.
The very fact that the disparity is accepted and allowed to persist is pretty demotivating. When deadlines slip, its not the stragglers who are asked what happened, its the high performers. It's not the stragglers who are asked to work more hours, because management knows that those hours would be ineffective. What that really translates to is "Gee, being 10x more productive is great, but we're behind, and you're the developer most prepared to fix this problem we have, so we're gonna need 15x."
Are there actually 10x developers who don't resent their 10% counterparts?
Having worked for a whole bunch of companies over the past few years, one thing is a constant in the tech industry: there is a limitless supply of candidates for any given job, all of which are bad. It is a huge, challenging problem to find the small number of people you want to hire. I'm not sold that "10x developers" really exist, but I know that "0x developers" are plentiful: these candidates aren't just a "poor fit", they are entirely unable to do the job they're applying for. I've seen far too many graduates who are entirely unable to solve the most basic screening questions, and just don't seem able to write code.
In a similar vein, it is entirely reasonable for a company to be simultaneously cutting jobs and hiring, if they are cutting persistent underperformers and trying to hire more promising replacements. (Some legal fiction is necessary to do this in the current regulatory environment)