[anjakefala]

> For example, some apparently 10x engineers were only so because they were allowed to only work on interesting, relatively easy early stage work. The difficult, fiddly work of mopping up the awkward corners was left to other engineers, who were considered 'slow'.

I am someone who loves mopping up the awkward corner cases. For me, this is the most fun part of coding. I think the early design and infrastructure work is actually pretty challenging work. The decisions made at this stage pay dividends later on, in ease of debugging, api goodness, future expendability, etc. I prefer collaborating with senior engineers who are strong and relatively fast with that, and then I help clean-up to facilitate their speed. If everyone is on-board, I am not sure what is wrong with this arrangement.

[kybernetikos]

> If everyone is on-board, I am not sure what is wrong with this arrangement.

I think that insufficient attention is paid in hiring to building a team of people whose interests compliment each other.

The situation you describe is fantastic. Problems would arise only if you and the senior were compared on speed for what are actually two very different kinds of work.

[Viliam1234]

I believe the "full-stack developer" meme did a lot of harm here. It is hard to discuss different strengths of different people openly, when everyone pretends they understand everything equally, because admitting that you specialize on X and can only do mediocre work in Y makes you seem like a loser compared to people who pretend to be great at everything.

I have seen people happy when the database guy was allowed to design the database, the back-end guy was allowed to write back end, the front-end guy was allowed to write front end, and the CSS guy wrote the CSS. Then management intervened and said no, the highest priority task must be done immediately, by the first person available. Afterwards both the happiness levels and the code quality returned to the mean.