Agreed. However, there's a caveat: not every organization needs 10x engineers. In fact, a lot wouldn't know what to do with them. So as far as they're concerned, they don't exist.
After all, a 10x engineer is still only 1x when it comes to adding new functionality to your CRUD app.
However, when you need a scalable recommendation system built in a weekend, that works on a sharded database, uses clever math to run with limited resources, and fits processing into an overnight cron job, and just works (without breaking down every few days over the next couple months), that's when the "10x" guy or girl is your only choice.
That is what I was thinking. It was just two weeks ago I found a 10x hire. Maybe even more. I'm usually by far the most productive on my team and this guy is kicking my ass.
I'm not sure where Rand was going with this, but I would articulate the line this way:
"There is no such thing as sustained, responsible 10x engineering after one achieves market fit." (How's that for sufficiently caveating?)
It's easy to do 10x-engineering at an early stage, but it gets progressively more difficult as products/services emerge. And as those products & services are iterated upon to find market fit, sustainability and flexibility become more important.
If every 10x-engineer also took the hippocratic oath, then we would be on to something.
Um, no. There really aren't 10x engineers unless you're comparing someone with 2+ yrs experience to someone with 0 yrs. And by years experience, I mean years spent actually making things to completion. What you'll eventually find out is that there's 2x employees and 0.25x employees but very little above that. More than anything, it'll be the team dynamics and the company fit that determines who is or isn't in the upper/lower brackets.
And in the seo space as my seo director said they dont really value deep technical skills that can analyse a 10 year old 10 million page site with major problems - and come up with an action plan to fix it.
The reality is that there are 10x engineers. They likely won't come work for you though.