I guarantee you that the "10x" engineer would not be able to co-ordinate anything with any other team or department in the company. Of course the hierarchical structure of companies means that just having good people skills, and good management skills, means better compensation. But the most important skill in any capitalist economy is organizing labor, since capitalism is a way of organizing labor, so those who are the best at organizing and directing labor are the most well compensated since they are able to produce the most profits.

There needs to be roles for pure ICs. In deep tech orgs, it’s almost impossible to get work done unless you have a bench of folks with domain expertise, comfortable on your software, and in tune with and guiding product direction. Diluting the core IC responsibility in these orgs with mandatory influence/scope guidelines is counter productive.

That being said, when I was in the role of a principal engineer at a major tech company - my ultimate responsibility was to get the project to success. What that meant on any given week could have alignment, coding, guiding, or reviewing.