I totally agree that it's possible for people to produce a ton more value than others. I just think it's super rare.
In my experience it's a lot more common that I see people churning out 10x the AMOUNT of code (or some other insane metric) which generates an enormous amount of work for everyone else to keep up with, fix, maintain, understand, etc. These people are praised for their output. But are they making the TEAM 10x more productive? No way.
Prolific output doesn't always mean 10x value created. I know people know this, but I think the reason people are sick of the trope is because they've been burned by a "10x'er" that was all output, not actual value.
Producing 10x value is actually.. really, really hard.
I don’t think that’s quite true. I probably write 10x less code than most of my colleagues, but where I write code it impacts (and hopefully improves) everything.
I think we agree!
At my work the guy who wrote pretty much all of the code can fix stuff far faster than me. But then it's not documented, not tested and he is really unhelpful at explaining it to others. Is that really a 10x engineer, when the fact others have difficult is down to the way he works?
From my professional experience, it’s obvious that there are coworkers that can output even 100x impact qhen compared to peers. When judging entrepreneurs it’s visible some people’s multiplier/productivity is in the million-times compared to others.
Given automation is at the core of our work as devs, why do some people think 10x isn’t credible?