Good article, though I can't agree with the conclusion.<p>"Expert" doesn't really communicate much. There's a meme that's probably older than I am that goes something like:<p>"An expert is no different from the rest of us, he just has a binder and slides."<p>Today it would probably be a PowerPoint presentation, but the point stands: Expert has been an overused and overloaded term for far longer than 10x, and other than specifying a focus ("video encoding expert" or similar) it is insufficient to actually communicate to non-technical people the distinction.<p>Saying specialist is also descriptive of your focus, but similarly doesn't get to the underlying difference between and average and a 10x developer.<p>A video compression specialist is going to be really good at video compression, and maybe that's because they're really familiar with the math and the domain. And that means they could create compression algorithms much faster than I could; I don't know the technical details of any compression algorithms to the degree that I'd even consider taking such a job. Some tasks <i>are</i> best handled by experts or specialists; that's fine and appropriate.<p>But a generalist "10x" developer can typically handle <i>many</i> domains. In fact, jumping between domains is not uncommon. Their "expertise" is in being able to grok complex systems and multiple levels of indirection and interaction; what the systems are doing is less important. Maybe the video compression specialist is <i>also</i> a 10x developer, but just prefers to stay in the video compression space; that's fine. But I've seen code written by specialists were <i>really good</i> at their specialty, and their code worked...but it was <i>not</i> good code. And one hallmark of a 10x developer is that the code is good.<p>So both expert and specialist are really orthogonal to 10x.