[ramraj07]

You said a lot of things, many I agree and have experienced as well, but never answered OP. How do you create 10x engineers? Well you can’t. And you probably shouldn’t try. If you’re 10x somewhere it means you’re at a place with a significant (I.e. 10x) skills mismatch between people in the team. It’s not fun for anyone, the company and team become too dependent on you, and you skew any ability to project how long work would take on both sides by your presence.

The best bet for both parties would be they find places “where they belong” - if you consider yourself 10x ie the smartest person in the room, you need to seek a better room for yourself where that’s not the case.

[sweaty]

But that is the answer, in that there is no answer :) And agreed, it is always a mismatch. But I do think that with what I said, that'd be the foundation to create a 10x engineer. That's how I became one, because I was matched with people of that skill level and got to work directly together with them for years. And if I'm 10x by my company's standards, go figure how good those guys were ;)

[flavianh]

You're right in a way, but you're missing the "10x compared to what?". Consider the 1x baseline as being the median productivity of your development team (which is definitely hard to approximate, but for the sake of the exercise let's take 'value-added tickets per developer' [which excludes bugs/rework]). Then the goal is to do 10x on this median in a reasonable amount of time. Rince and repeat.