Thanks for the note. I understand your point, but I'll question the premise.

20-100x of what? What metric are you measuring? Lines of code? Pull requests? Bugs solved? Features architected? Teammates coached? Tests written? Incidents responded? Documentation written?

Writing boatloads of code in isolation doesn't make a great developer. It can actually be toxic to the team.

The 10x (or 100x) engineer doesn't even have to be asshole for the team to suffer. In my experience, these engineers can be slightly condescending, unhelpful to teammates, or go rogue on features.

That said, at my last job I wrote significantly more code than anyone else on my team. I shipped more features while also pairing a ton and responding to incidents. Still, I never thought of myself as a "##x engineer."

It's not the existence of leaders or productive engineers that I'm arguing against. It's the deification of the idea of a "10x engineer" and the expectation that engineers should want to be one.