> they will just be average or much worse when their motivation is destroyed

Ouch

That's true, and I'd lean on the "much worse" side. When you join a project that has very minimal tooling and almost no automation, you're facing a dilemma: should I focus on improving the tooling while delaying features or should I deliver features while making future improvements ever harder to make?

The problem with this is that neither is good for your mental health. Unless you're joining that project with a specific goal of improving its development process, don't bother. Run away. Fast.

Especially if there are already other devs that are militantly against your take on dev process improvements. The level of emotional distress is hard to fully appreciate without experiencing a situation like this. Suggesting the simplest and most obvious things becomes a brutal fight that you're guaranteed to lose. Living without them makes you miserable in its own right. You're trapped between a rock and a hard place with no way out.

If out of various kinds of psychotherapy you pick the one based on an experience of living in a Nazi concentration camp as the most applicable - it's time to run. Really. Don't look back.

I agree with the compounding impact of self-automation.

Also, some people just keep growing their creative outlook. They are not afraid to try solving bigger & bigger problems.

I worked with an engineer (individual contributor) at a company with a lot of related software products.

Time and again, he would hibernate then come out with a new well developed tool or product that either impacted the entire product line or started a new product line.

Once the value of what he had done was obvious, and his clever design had stabilized in a form understandable to others, he would hand it off to a team of great developers to polish, release, update etc.

10x impact would be an understatement.

If we measure impact, it is easier to see where 1x, 5x, 10x, or 100x can be achievable and verifiable.

Also x/2, x/10 or (and I have seen it) -x. One team leader, -5x at least, until they were removed.

Yeah a traditional 10x engineer would know how to create/use leverage to enable much more work to be done faster in this case creating a great tool, reminds me about a car mechanic how he showed me this weird tool and said it was one of the most useful tool he’s fashioned

We should not forget that different people have different talents. That creative superstar guy may have been great at coming up with new stuff but terrible at maintaining stuff. Or at debugging some urgent prod issue under time stress on a saturday evening. You need those people too that enjoy the day-to-day maintenance to keep the house clean, or the occasional firefighting. A good team contains all those types and they complement each other.

In this case, they were great maintaining stuff too. They remained available to dip into that work whenever it helped.

But as a rule, it would not have been challenging enough to keep them engaged for long. And it would have been a waste of their talents for themselves and the organization.

It wouldn't just have wasted their time directly, but wasted the opportunity for less (but still A-grade) developers from diving into a new area and maximizing its value. There was still lots of creative work to be done. These were not trivial new areas.

The other thing is making better choices of what to make, how to make it, and most importantly things not to do. That can often save 9x from most anything.

Yeah, being able to negotiate with the PM to still solve the problem in a easier way than initially proposed is probably where I've had the most impact over the years.