"I'm now convinced there's 'one easy trick' to becoming a 10x engineer and that's quitting your job. You learn out of necessity when you have few resources and

"I'm now convinced there's 'one easy trick' to becoming a 10x engineer and that's quitting your job. You learn out of necessity when you have few resources and no fallbacks. It also seems obvious now in hindsight that the surest way to realize your full potential is to work on your own terms building something you care about." I couldn't agree more. I see a lot of engineers in startups that claim to have X years of experience, but when you read their code, it more like 1*X years of experience. They never progressed passed the 1 year point because they were doing the same things again and again. Most of the time it was not the correct way either but because they have repeated the same process so many times, its the only ways they knew and naturally accepted it as is. The best programmers I have seen are always those that worked on their own project with very limited resources. You are force to learn and do things out of the box this way. It's definitely a slow learning process but for me, just thinking back on how much I have learnt (and be able to utilize my knowledge correctly) in the last year is mind boggling.