[PhasmaFelis]

One of the many problems with the 10x Engineer concept is that it imagines that skill is a single dimension, when in fact it depends massively on context, environment, and the specifics of individual experience and the problem at hand.

I am definitely not a 10x anything, but my group once got handed a massive data-processing task that my supervisors--better coders than me, to be sure--believed was impossible to automate, and budgeted 200+ man-hours to do manually. I asked them to hold off for a minute and successfully automated the entire process in three days. That doesn't mean I'm an all-purpose supercoder; it means I happen to be really damn good at analyzing patterns in data sets. Give me work that I'm good at, but don't expect me to be that good at everything.

[ColinDabritz]

Also related is the myth that "an engineer" is a fungible resource. They are not. It's not one problem space. You can't swap engineers around like that, you have to match skill sets and experience to the problems you're having, or build new skills.

[blah32497]

There is a trade off. If you don't swap your people around then they become very one dimensional. Sometimes it better to put someone less experienced in an area on a project so that he gains perspective (ie. see all junior staff)

[ColinDabritz]

A good point. A better phrasing would be "you can't move engineers around like that and expect them to be instantly productive". The problem is that engineers are viewed as being one dimensional as in "amount of engineering". Swapping for cross training, skill building, or just plain variety is quite healthy.

[debacle]

In those three days, you were a 10x engineer - you accomplished 200 man-hours of work in ~24ish hours.

'10x' is about measuring productivity, and nothing else. A 10x programmer when it comes to HTML form validation might be really amazing at what he does, however may still be worth less than a 1x database administrator.