> 10x exist in most fields. In academia there are definitely people who are heads and shoulders above others, for example.
I think this depends a bit on your viewpoint. When most people think of 10x developers, they think of ten times their theoretical maximum output, not their actual output.
The highly productive people I met were good developers, but not leagues beyond in skill. They just had their work setup to not be bogged down too much by meetings, knew the application and had the ability to actually do productive work to the scale of something like 8-10h per day. If you compare that to your average developer, who will be somewhat impeded by management overhead, 'only' be reasonably skilled and max out at something like 4 fully productive hours a day (2 on Friday), it really seems like those guys can put out 10x the work.
Well, it might simply be "push the project architecture in right direction so whole team overall is efficient".
It's also probably a lot of anecdotes, "this dev solved weird issue in a day where other dev was stuck for week and couldn't find it!".
They might be 2x developer on normal day but happened to be this or that, debugged some hard bugs everyone else got stuck at and the people in project remembered those few good performances and assumed they do everything that much better
I think this depends a bit on your viewpoint. When most people think of 10x developers, they think of ten times their theoretical maximum output, not their actual output.
The highly productive people I met were good developers, but not leagues beyond in skill. They just had their work setup to not be bogged down too much by meetings, knew the application and had the ability to actually do productive work to the scale of something like 8-10h per day. If you compare that to your average developer, who will be somewhat impeded by management overhead, 'only' be reasonably skilled and max out at something like 4 fully productive hours a day (2 on Friday), it really seems like those guys can put out 10x the work.