Perhaps that is what makes them '10x developers': a great familiarity with their toolset and a deep understanding of the problems they are solving. In this sense I don't think it's bad to idolize them, as familiarity and understanding are achievable by many people, and they could all become a '10x developer'.
Baloney. I don't think it's "black magic", but as a software engineer with some deep familiarity with my tool chain I'm not going to pretend that I could ever be as productive as some of these folks. It's like when I see another post about a Fabrice Bellard project, and I think "he gets done in a year what it would take me about a career".
I don't understand this fetishization of "everyone has nearly equal ability" in the face of tons of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I don't believe everyone has the same ability. What I do believe is that performance is explainable and there's a practical upper limit to raw output.
I made a side project that I spent 1-2years building on and off and had people saying "wow I could never build that". That's bullshit. If they were of similar intelligence and put in a similar amount of time and effort I'm sure they'd be able to replicate what I did.
The luxury of being able to spend ample amounts of time on a project or idea is also massively overlooked.
That's not all it is. Some people are just better than others. No matter how hard every tries to be the best football or basketball player, only an extremely small set of people even have the chance to make it. There are physical traits they'll never have and mental fortitude to use those traits. You can't grow yourself to 7 ft tall and you never will be able to. What makes you think the brain is any different.
