Programming is, in many ways like music - it's a multi-faceted skill with elements of math, pattern recognition, abstraction, and so on. (I've been doing both on and off for 35 years now). Personally, in my experience, I think a few things are true:<p>A) Way more people think they are 2x or 10x or whatever than they are. When you solve a hard problem, it makes you <i>feel</i> like a genius. As we never get to be in other people's brains, we don't realize they all get the same feelings.<p>B) There ARE geniuses out there. I have met musicians and heard of students (from professor friends) who are unarguably geniuses. People who can do shit like remember an entire Keith Jarrett concert and play it to their piano teacher afterwards. Or memorize a piano concerto from the score on an airplane and then go perform it. (I think that was Rubenstein? not sure.) They are out there. There are folks who were 10x better than I'll ever be by the time they were 16 because their brains just wired totally differently from regular people when they matured. They don't necessarily have stellar careers because they are frequently total oddballs in other areas. Talk to any professional music prof and they can tell you about some very odd geniuses. I have no doubt these people exist in comp sci too, they sure do in math. (Fun fact, piano genius Glenn Gould like to do giant number arithmetic in his head for fun!)<p>C) There are also a lot of professional programmers who just aren't good. It's so hard to evaluate that many folks who never really took to it can muddle through a degree and hold down a job, especially on a larger team. And heck, they are probably good contributors on these large teams by virtue of their other skills - someone needs to be good at reading requirements and talking to management.<p>So sure, I agree, the whole "I'm a 10x" or "Be a 10x" thing is usually balogna. But 2x or 3x? For sure. And there are geniuses out there who just smoke the rest of us without blinking.