How to spot 10x Engineers at every stage of their career

What real top performers look like at junior, mid, and senior levels.

What is a 10x Engineer?

An engineer who is 10 times more productive than the average engineer. Which means they write 10x more code than anyone else.

Right? Wrong!

That’s not a 10x engineer. It’s literally quite impossible to produce 10 times more code than other engineers on your own.

Software engineering is a team activity but I believe that at each stage of your career, one can demonstrate behaviours that have the potential to 10x team performance.

Uplift others

A few years ago, I worked with an engineer who rarely spoke with the team.

He was described to me as a 10x Engineer because he was producing a lot of output.

Very senior.
Quiet guy.
Always coding.

At first, I assumed he was just shy.
But over time, I realized something was off.

Every time we had an incident, he’d jump in, fix it, and disappear.
Quite convenient, but…
No notes.
No documentation.
No explanation to anyone of what was wrong / what he did.

One day, I asked if he could walk the team through a fix just so we could all learn from it.