I've been a 10x engineer, I've been a 1x engineer, and I've been a 0.5x engineer. There isn't some consistent set of things, it's a ton of circumstance.
Now, as a leader type, I would prefer to hire 1x engineers to 10x engineers, for a whole litany of reasons. 1x engineers are largely predictable, where as 10x can be 10x in any wild direction, because they're more or less deciding for themselves a bunch of shit they really shouldn't be.
10x engineers like to decide for themselves things like how to go to market or which features to build in what order, without doing any of the requisite research or information gathering necessary. It's infuriating because 10x engineers think passion or some arbitrary definition of "Correctness" gives them power, when in reality they're just operating with a heavily limited set of information (gee, I wonder how they had all that time to build stuff, maybe because they weren't attending meetings???).
Sorry, this turned into a not-very-coherent rant, but the point is 10x engineers aren't worth hiring as anything other than literally employee #1, and even then it's a huge dice roll.
Now, as a leader type, I would prefer to hire 1x engineers to 10x engineers, for a whole litany of reasons. 1x engineers are largely predictable, where as 10x can be 10x in any wild direction, because they're more or less deciding for themselves a bunch of shit they really shouldn't be.
10x engineers like to decide for themselves things like how to go to market or which features to build in what order, without doing any of the requisite research or information gathering necessary. It's infuriating because 10x engineers think passion or some arbitrary definition of "Correctness" gives them power, when in reality they're just operating with a heavily limited set of information (gee, I wonder how they had all that time to build stuff, maybe because they weren't attending meetings???).
Sorry, this turned into a not-very-coherent rant, but the point is 10x engineers aren't worth hiring as anything other than literally employee #1, and even then it's a huge dice roll.