Who is the mythical 10x engineer, and do they even exist? 🤔

Do they write 10x lines of code? 📝 Do they produce 10x more commits? 🔥 Do they build 10x more pipelines and dashboards? 🏗️📊

When I was getting started, the image I had in mind of a 10x engineer was a person who delivers 10x faster or 10x more.

However, having met some incredibly talented people, I realized it’s not always about the speed. As crazy as it may sound, those who seemed to push the projects forward the most did not seem to write that much code altogether. Instead, they were focusing on the right thing. 🎯

Here are some of the qualities of the most talented people I have worked with:

  • Focused on the big picture – why are we solving the problem? 🌍
  • Simplifying complexity – often deleting more code than writing ✂️
  • Raising the skill level of the team (code reviews, best practices, unblocking) 🤝
  • Pragmatic & biased towards action ⚡
  • Always learning 📚

I am pretty sure that these people delivered 10x average value so they do exist. What do I mean by “value”? 🤨 Probably a topic for another post.

Counterintuitively – doing LESS and focusing on the right things seems to pay off more. This makes sense from the 80/20 rule perspective.

20% of the tasks end up generating 80% of the value.

You can be extremely productive, over-engineering data pipelines or building custom tools where not needed. But raw productivity ≠ value.

Why aim to become a 10x engineer? The comparison is the thief of joy. Unless we compare ourselves to our past selves and see big progress!

I am hoping that the reflections from this blog will help me become a 10x engineer. And hopefully help someone else in the process!