> Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. That is not hard. And putting all the spotlight on individual ability has a way of letting your leaders off the hook for doing their jobs. It is a HUGE competitive advantage if you can build sociotechnical systems where less experienced engineers can convert their effort and energy into product and business momentum.
This hits close to home for me recently. I don't profess to be a 10x engineer, but I found myself on a team with a few people with much less experience and competence than I am normally accustomed to. I started getting every single ticket with any kind of complexity, because I could get it done, and some people on my team couldn't. I could have continued this way, contributing a massive percentage of the output and claimed to be superior to everyone - but the reality is, for me anyway, this is exhausting (and feels really unfair). Plus I am a little lazy (as I believe all good sysadmins/sre's/ops guys are). I want my team to help me. So what I did was work extra for a few weeks and wrote a ton of abstractions over the most complex stuff we do (I dont write software, I write IAC, I'm aware this is a common pattern in software engineering) so that the less knowledgeable engineers could do the work I'd been doing much of. It freed my time up to work on more interesting problems. This was the first time in my career I had to do this without anyone already ordering me to.
I've been on teams where there was someone like me and everyone else was running around behind them frantically trying to keep up or cleaning up the inevitable tech debt that accumulates. It's miserable and really inefficient.
This hits close to home for me recently. I don't profess to be a 10x engineer, but I found myself on a team with a few people with much less experience and competence than I am normally accustomed to. I started getting every single ticket with any kind of complexity, because I could get it done, and some people on my team couldn't. I could have continued this way, contributing a massive percentage of the output and claimed to be superior to everyone - but the reality is, for me anyway, this is exhausting (and feels really unfair). Plus I am a little lazy (as I believe all good sysadmins/sre's/ops guys are). I want my team to help me. So what I did was work extra for a few weeks and wrote a ton of abstractions over the most complex stuff we do (I dont write software, I write IAC, I'm aware this is a common pattern in software engineering) so that the less knowledgeable engineers could do the work I'd been doing much of. It freed my time up to work on more interesting problems. This was the first time in my career I had to do this without anyone already ordering me to.
I've been on teams where there was someone like me and everyone else was running around behind them frantically trying to keep up or cleaning up the inevitable tech debt that accumulates. It's miserable and really inefficient.