Huh. FWIW, I do consider myself 10x. I've only rarely met developers who claim 10x but who weren't at least good developers. And I have met developers who were crap, but I don't think it of everyone else. Just the ones who were crap. ;)
It is true that I think of myself as particularly good. For reference, I was working for one of those companies I listed above, and I put in less than 30 hours in a typical week, and still got heaps of praise for how quickly I got things done (in calendar time). I kept asking for more to do, but never really got enough to keep me busy full time. Ultimately I ended up helping with related projects, or company-wide tooling, just because I enjoyed helping and had the time.
I didn't feel the need to prove anything, exactly, but sometimes things would go south and I'd put in more hours because I felt like something should have taken less time, yes. That's not "prove to me you're 10x!", but my work ethic coming out and keeping me on task until my expected workload was actually complete.
But even then I don't think I went beyond 45 hours in a week in my time there as an employee. And I didn't work on a weekend even once. If something really hadn't gotten done in what I felt like was a reasonable work week, I would have let it slide. That may have happened once, but only once. Making the proprietary company build system do things it wasn't precisely designed to do ... well, I just can't talk about it, since I don't swear in public posts. ;)
It is true that I think of myself as particularly good. For reference, I was working for one of those companies I listed above, and I put in less than 30 hours in a typical week, and still got heaps of praise for how quickly I got things done (in calendar time). I kept asking for more to do, but never really got enough to keep me busy full time. Ultimately I ended up helping with related projects, or company-wide tooling, just because I enjoyed helping and had the time.
I didn't feel the need to prove anything, exactly, but sometimes things would go south and I'd put in more hours because I felt like something should have taken less time, yes. That's not "prove to me you're 10x!", but my work ethic coming out and keeping me on task until my expected workload was actually complete.
But even then I don't think I went beyond 45 hours in a week in my time there as an employee. And I didn't work on a weekend even once. If something really hadn't gotten done in what I felt like was a reasonable work week, I would have let it slide. That may have happened once, but only once. Making the proprietary company build system do things it wasn't precisely designed to do ... well, I just can't talk about it, since I don't swear in public posts. ;)