I'm not sure I understand why people are so eager to conflate the term "10x engineer" with "an arrogant engineer who is only seemingly productive because of either obfuscation or generation of technical debt".
It seems blindingly obvious that there are people out there who are just... dramatically more effective programmers, in a holistic net-value-to-organization/world sense. Fabrice Bellard and John Carmack, to name two that jump to mind.
And while I've definitely never worked with programmers of their caliber, I have worked with people who truly were an order of magnitude more productive than me, either in sheer quantity of quality output or by dint of their efficacy at creating tooling/abstractions/apis that made other programmers more effective.
It seems blindingly obvious that there are people out there who are just... dramatically more effective programmers, in a holistic net-value-to-organization/world sense. Fabrice Bellard and John Carmack, to name two that jump to mind.
And while I've definitely never worked with programmers of their caliber, I have worked with people who truly were an order of magnitude more productive than me, either in sheer quantity of quality output or by dint of their efficacy at creating tooling/abstractions/apis that made other programmers more effective.