The 10x developer is not a myth (2013)
I&#x27;ve never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I&#x27;d like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist.<p>Now, I&#x27;ve seen 10x quality, though sometimes they&#x27;re a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for something on the order of 5x to 20x quality.<p>That higher quality might pay off long term for the buisness in hard to measure ways, such as faster future extenssion, better customer experience, less work required on bug fixing, etc. If that&#x27;s what people mean by 10x, I agree, they definitly exist, in fact, compared to the worst there&#x27;s probably infinite x as people are saying, some programmers can&#x27;t ever get certain things to work at all.<p>P.S.: Actually, I&#x27;ve seen maybe 2x or 3x productivity on teams with uneven standards, generally lacking code reviews. In those cases though, the 2x or 3x productivity programmers always had similarly lower quality code.