I agree with a lot of the points, but..<p><i>&gt; Most of the 10x factor is most likely explained by team and company factors (process, tech stack, etc) and applies to everyone in the team&#x2F;company. Intra-team variation is thus much smaller than 10x (even controlling for the fact that companies tend to attract people of equal caliber). Nature vs nurture…</i><p>Definitely not true! I have been in companies where 1 engineer outperformed 10 others with everything else being the same and on the same team. It was really obvious too. It does happen. eg, he could handle 10 bug or feature requests in the same time it took some of the other engineers to handle 1.