A more realistic view of 10x engineer is not someone who can produce 10x amount of code... it's producing the same amount of value at 1/10th the effort by being

A more realistic view of 10x engineer is not someone who can produce 10x amount of code... it's producing the same amount of value at 1/10th the effort by being able to focus on actual goal. Sometimes that means fixing existing codebase instead of the massive effort to do a rewrite (see gregjor's great comment). Sometimes that means figuring out that the custom legacy software can be replaced by an off-the-shelf solution. Sometimes that means figuring out that only some of the legacy software is actually important, so only that part needs to be maintained and the rest can be deprecated. See also https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/