I don't think there are any myths involved, we can name people. Fabrice Bellard leaps to mind. A bunch of the OSS maintainers. These people are just observably (much more than) 10x more productive than the standard developer. People cast from the same mold turn up from time to time in the corporate world too.
Part of it is problem selection, part of it is hard work, some fraction appears to be genius. But it is obvious and observable, I've seen average developers at work and they just won't achieve the results the top performers get even if given 10x as much time.
Part of it is problem selection, part of it is hard work, some fraction appears to be genius. But it is obvious and observable, I've seen average developers at work and they just won't achieve the results the top performers get even if given 10x as much time.