Maybe the 10x engineer isn’t true, but I’ve worked at companies where I was on a team and my output was equal to the rest of the team combined. So if there isn’t such a thing it must mean that there are 1/10X engineers and they’re prevalent.
If you're on a team of 10 people, 3 of those people will be doing about half the work. And then 7 are doing the other half. If there are 10 work units, the 3 are doing 5/3 of a work unit each and the 7 are doing 5/7 of a work unit each for a ratio of 2.3x
---
Yes, 1/10th developers are common - especially in larger teams. And there are also -1/2 developers too where someone will spend half their time just cleaning up after the -1/2 developer.
And just with the nature of teams, larger teams are going to have a significant fraction of the team doing very little work (note: this applies to consultancy teams too and if you get a team of 20 people to work on the project, you really should just get a team of 4 and stay on top of them as it will be less work to manage).
