The Myth of the 10x Engineer

The Rockstar engineer stays up all night. Churns out thousands of lines. Solves the problem nobody else can touch. Early in a startup, this feels heroic.

Then you try to change their code. Or they leave. Or they get sick for a week.

The system they built only makes sense to them. Custom patterns that don't match any documented approach. An architecture that lives in their head. No documentation. No knowledge transfer. Just a growing single point of failure. The team becomes dependent — changes wait for the Rockstar to review them, decisions wait for the Rockstar to weigh in. The bottleneck becomes the person, not the work.

Not every valuable contribution shows up in a commit. Some engineers spend half their day clarifying requirements so the team doesn't waste two weeks building the wrong thing. They onboard new hires. They notice when a project is drifting and quietly pull it back on track. Their Git commits look modest, and the team's output is higher because of them.

Early in a career, the instinct is to be the hero. Maximum commits. Maximum features. Visible impact. As you grow, the math changes. Unblock three people and their collective output exceeds what you could have built alone. You stop being the soloist. You become the conductor.