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?
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?