Even though I agree with all the points made by the author, the notion of 10x programmer reminds me of one-man army movies like Rambo and it's equally ridiculous. Software development is a collaborative effort, not a contest where whoever commits more LOC or finishes more tasks wins. It's not that hard to be 10 times more productive than anyone else if you built something from the scratch, possibly reinventing the wheel instead of using common libraries/frameworks, wrote no documentation and you're not really willing to share your knowledge with other developers. Sadly, this happens - see e.g. http://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-inner-json-effect [edit: added link]