The 10x engineer is occasionally real—they're just better at avoiding 10x time traps.
Well-intentioned engineers often spend huge amounts of time on things that don't matter:
• Software catalogs for 3 services
• RFC processes for 5-person teams
• 1-hour "architectural" meetings
• Future-proof abstractions with no use case
• Rolling your own auth
The "10x" engineers avoid these pitfalls that make others 10x less productive.