Less testing, Documentation, Guarding against typos, better IDE support, better performance;
But there is a whole new generation of web developers who don't bother to learn algorithms or low level programming, and just churn out code with that hot new framework. That kind of programmers are also the ones that choose a technology because "it looks easier".
The world would be nice if management people understood not all programmers are equal, the 10x programmer is not a myth. But here on HN or reddit you see most people arguing that all programmers are similarly productive. And what we get for this is more electron apps.
You are right that quality of programmer skill and productivity has high variance, but the way people talked about the "10x programmer" was a vague vision that people pasted their ideas and personal bugaboos onto. So people got into increasingly-heated arguments and talked past each other. When we create social concepts, we need to strive for something like falsifiability -- something that lets you look at an example and say "Well actually no, thats not 'high-performing programmer' behavior -- for {{describable reason}}"
Categories matter. We should shape our categories for human happiness and human effectiveness, but categories matter.
I think it's really not that some programmers do 10x more, but some people with the same job title do a different job. Some engineers take responsibility for product or for ecosystem; some engineers tick off tasks on a list. (Both can be very valid, and bleeding for product quality at a company is definitely not inherently good.)
For example functions only take objects of supported types. Many invariants are verifiable at compile time. Especially when you have generics, structural typing and ADTs, the expressiveness is pretty good.
But there is a whole new generation of web developers who don't bother to learn algorithms or low level programming, and just churn out code with that hot new framework. That kind of programmers are also the ones that choose a technology because "it looks easier".
The world would be nice if management people understood not all programmers are equal, the 10x programmer is not a myth. But here on HN or reddit you see most people arguing that all programmers are similarly productive. And what we get for this is more electron apps.