The idea of the "10x developer" has been floating around the industry for years.
Usually, it gets framed around speed.
- Someone who writes code faster.
- Ships more tickets.
- Pushes more commits.
- Produces more.
Personally, I've never really liked that definition.
Not because highly productive engineers don't exist. They absolutely do. But I think we've been measuring the wrong thing.
The best engineers I've worked with were rarely the people writing the most code.
In fact, sometimes they were writing less. Because a lot of their value came from preventing problems before they ever existed.
They asked uncomfortable questions early and spotted assumptions no one else noticed. They challenged designs that "should probably be fine," and they saw downstream consequences before the rest of the room had even finished discussing the feature.
And sometimes?
They slowed things down.
That part is important. Because speed and effectiveness are not always the same thing.
I've seen engineers move incredibly fast, straight into bad decisions. I've seen teams optimize themselves directly into complexity.
I've even seen projects hit every sprint goal while quietly becoming increasingly hard to maintain.
The best engineers I've worked with understood something deeper:
Working code is not the finish line.
A strong engineer thinks beyond:
- "Does this work?"
- "Did the tests pass?"
- "Can we ship it?"
They think about:
- maintainability
- operational cost
- onboarding friction
- future flexibility
- failure modes
- team comprehension
They think in trade-offs.
That's where the real multiplier effect comes from. Not typing speed. Not commit count. Not how quickly someone can scaffold a feature.
The real multiplier is reducing future pain.
Sometimes that looks like:
- preventing a rewrite
- simplifying a design
- catching a scalability issue early
- asking the question no one else thought to ask
And sometimes it looks like saying:
"I think we're solving the wrong problem."
That kind of engineering value is hard to measure.
Mostly because the best outcomes are often invisible.
Nobody sees:
- the outage that never happened
- the incident that was avoided
- the migration that didn't become necessary
- the complexity that never entered the system
But experienced engineers know those things matter.
A lot.
Ironically, AI has made me think about this even more. Because AI can absolutely make people faster. I've seen it firsthand. But faster is only useful if the direction is correct.
If anything, the rise of AI makes strong engineering judgment even more valuable.
Because now the bottleneck isn't always code production.
Sometimes the bottleneck is knowing what should be built in the first place.
The best engineers I know can work in multiple languages, frameworks, and environments.
But the thing that makes them valuable isn't syntax.
It's perspective.
They can look at a problem from every angle:
- technical
- operational
- organizational
- long-term
They don't just understand how to build systems. They understand how systems fail.
That's the skill.
And no productivity metric fully captures it.
So when people talk about "10x developers"...
I think they're pointing at something real. But I think they're measuring the wrong thing.
The best engineers aren't the ones producing 10x more code.
They're the ones creating 10x less chaos.
