Well, that’s the trick isn’t it? A 10x engineer does that. Because you may not doesn’t mean no one can. A large part of my successful career has been built around my ability to intuitively discern the essence of the challenges my customers face and proposing then implementing novel solutions to it. I don’t know how I do it, but I do. I’m able to enlist my teams to a productive and useful way, cut through blocking issues rapidly, and (when I was writing a lot of code) implementing clean solutions that the rest of my team were struggling with. The 10x doesn’t come from writing 10x the LOC, it comes from writing the right 1 line of code 10x faster than another engineer, and finding ways to make your team around you 10x more productive. I’m sorry you’ve not had a chance to work with folks like this. And you are right, they are in top employers because they are valuable, and are over represented in FAANG. And they are extraordinarily rare, and as such are extraordinarily expensive. But rarity doesn’t imply impossibility.