[scarface74]

My statement was referring specifically to an "individual contributor" and I said as much in the original post. If you are a team lead, by definition you aren't just an "individual contributor" and you're also not the "10x developer". Your increased effectiveness is because you have a team under you and you are a "force multiplier".

but "careful, paranoid engineering" does too. Almost by definition, your really junior employees don't really know how to do the latter. (They'll often be able to cargo cult it, which can be a start, but they won't really understand it.)

I also specifically said the difference between someone with 10 years of experience and someone with 20 years experience. If you have 10 years of experience -- you hopefully aren't a "really junior employee".

[jbay808]

I've worked with a 10x developer. He wasn't a team lead because he wasn't interested in being a team lead and also probably wouldn't have been nearly as good at it as the person who was.

But man, was he ever transformative. Not only in terms of handling the most technically challenging tasks and solving the black-magic challenges that nobody else wanted to touch, knowing the C standard like the back of his hand, and getting things done quickly to a high standard of quality. He also was a force multiplier, because he would help others debug their problems when they got stuck and get them back on their feet and productive again, give advice for how to best handle various edge cases, and designed and maintained our tooling. He was a mentor to junior members of the team, and the team lead would ask his input and advice for how long things might take, what risks he could see causing delays, etc.

You can't plan around having someone like that but they make a world of difference if you're lucky enough to work alongside one.

[blueboo]

Likewise. To have someone with immaculate technical judgment means you potentially have a custodian that keeps an entire multi-team codebase on track.

[jerf]

My apologies, that's a fair defense.

I suppose I so deeply agreed with you I went total mental blindspot on the idea that someone could be a 20 years skilled software engineer and not be (technically, if not necessarily managerially) leading at least a small technical team. I'm not going to delete my post because I think it still has interesting stuff in it, but I do apologize for my tone of disagreement.