[angarg12]

I'm not quite sold on the first bullet point that if the impact of your company/project is 10x, then you are a 10x engineer.

Here is my case. In my previous (small) company we achieved a yearly revenue of ~1M eur. I was super proud that I directly contributed 10% of that revenue.

My current team in Big Tech generates millions of revenue per month. I could do a small improvement in a week and generate more than 100k in value.

Does that mean that I am 100x because my impact is 100x? is it even my achievement at all?

It's true that high performing engineers perform high leverage activities, but if we take it at face value then excellent engineers stuck in low value companies/products would be much worse than mediocre engineers working in high impact products.

Surely the answer is somewhere in between. Great engineers do the best with what they have available. Sometimes they might influence their environment to increase leverage but this isn't a given.

[fnbr]

you’re not making the right comparison. The right comparison would be within the same org. Is there someone on your team that generates $1M per week? Then they’re 10x you. Or does everyone else generate $10k per week? Then you’re 10x them.

[angarg12]

That's exactly my point. The comparison is not mine, but from the article.

> but my work at Sendwave led to saving well over 10x more money, because the scale of the product was bigger and the improvements I was making were more important.