I always thought of 10x engineer not as one that writes 1000 LoC while others write 100 LoC. Rather, as one that says, at an early stage of development "let's do it this way" and the total amount of manyears spent on the project (including maintenance etc.) happens to be 100 rather than 1000, which would be the case if second best approach is pursued.
There's an old programmers joke about this, which I'm not going to try and re-hash in entirety, but basically it's a listing of C++ code that starts off small, then as the programmer gets experience and learns how to do it 'better', the code grows, and grows, and becomes a massive engine of code. Then of course, as the years pass and the engineer gets more experience, the code shrinks and shrinks until it's slightly smaller than the original.
And I digress. Every growing C programmer pass into a stage where he wants to push that Seasoned professional code into the least amount of lines possible. Even if nobody can read the lines.
