Someone imagining they are brilliant doesn’t make them brilliant.
More so if in the light of day their work sucks.
Discussions about 10x engineers are not about “wannabe 10x engineers”.
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I have yet to come across an intellectual area where there isn’t a long tail of higher talent.
As the “x” goes up they just get more rare in reality, and even rarer to see. Because they are not always being optimally challenged. Most problems are mundane. And optimally challenging workers isn’t really a business plan for anything.
I think there is such thing as a 10x problem, which you have to find before your 10x engineer really shines. Identifying hard but exceptionally valuable problems to solve takes 10x vision. And time and luck.
If by “create some” you mean “Identify a major new revenue stream” or “Investigate something everyone else considers great, improve it 10x and save hundreds of millions of dollars”, then yeah, that’s what I do.
I've seen more of what someone called "wannabe 10x" making a career of turning non-10x problems into a series of 2 year Greenfield project pitches and failures to launch across multiple firms. You can actually see people pull this off for 6-10 years before they need to do something more productive.
Oh for sure. I’ve seen people get promoted based off the possibility of the bullshit idea they’ve come up with, and then move on before reality kicks in.
More so if in the light of day their work sucks.
Discussions about 10x engineers are not about “wannabe 10x engineers”.
—
I have yet to come across an intellectual area where there isn’t a long tail of higher talent.
As the “x” goes up they just get more rare in reality, and even rarer to see. Because they are not always being optimally challenged. Most problems are mundane. And optimally challenging workers isn’t really a business plan for anything.
I think there is such thing as a 10x problem, which you have to find before your 10x engineer really shines. Identifying hard but exceptionally valuable problems to solve takes 10x vision. And time and luck.