Disagree with this. There are absolutely 10x and even 50x engineers out there. Yes they almost always have egos and people complain about them all the time.
But they also build the right product at the right time for the right user and do the work of an entire product + engineering team - often much faster.
Most large, successful companies today have a handful of these guys among the first 20 employees.
This is part of the problem, we (mostly) all agree there actually are 10x and 50x engineers, but there are some people that are conflating 10x execution is being 10x the dickhead. Look in this thread, there are plenty of examples of 10x developers who aren't total dicks to the people around them and don't negatively effect everyone else.
What we need to do is look at the intersections: There are people who are 10x engineers (Peter Norvig) -great. There are 10x engineers who are dicks to the people around them (Linus Torvalds). There are people who think they're 10x engineers but aren't, which are fine (let's be kind as use me as an example) and there are people who think they're 10x engineers who aren't - but are dickheads because of it.
Even if you are a 10x engineer, you shouldn't be a dick - because it's demonstrable that you don't have to be a dick to be a 10x engineer.
I would say it's pretty obvious that the group of people who think they're a 10x engineer and act like a dick is way bigger than the number of actual 10x engineers. That's what I see in the programming community general - everyone has the story of some guy who thinks he's a rockstar but is actually just making everyone's lives hell.
Now if you don't actually know if someone is a 10x-er you've got a group of possible 10x-ers and its polluted by this large pool of people who really are dicks, and really aren't a 10xer
But they also build the right product at the right time for the right user and do the work of an entire product + engineering team - often much faster.
Most large, successful companies today have a handful of these guys among the first 20 employees.