Creating value. It sounds abstract but so far it's proven to be the most reliable and incontrovertible motivating ethos in my career. When you adopt a value-cre

Creating value. It sounds abstract but so far it's proven to be the most reliable and incontrovertible motivating ethos in my career. When you adopt a value-creation mindset, it washes into the calculus of just about every decision you make. So, for example, if you're an early-stage company, a value-oriented mindset will lead you to the most efficient approach to get a working MVP. You might think about how you'll evolve the system, but you won't do something stupid like try to manage a complex Kubernetes deployment from the outset. You'll be careful not to introduce too many components into the system, understanding how even things that appear simple invariably affect the total risk profile of your system and, by extension, your business. You proceed in a manner such that the tech is responsive to and mirrors the business' requirements. In data analysis, you won't go down stupid rabbit holes asking questions with answers that no one would care about. You'll prefer reliable, grokable statistical modeling on larger datasets to say using a deepnet to fit noise on a gratuitously tiny sample. You'll understand and accept that there are often questions you simply cannot accurately answer with the information available to you. You'll do the sometimes monotonous work of helping to instrument your business with metrics, because you understand that a business that can't quantify itself is effectively DoA (and therefore good instrumentation is among the highest value contributions you can make). Honestly, I've discovered that the technical problems are nearly irrelevant. There's almost always a way. It's deterministic. What's so much more important is knowing how to identify the best use of your effort to drive value. The 10x engineer, in my mind, is someone who knows how to avoid blackhole projects and shitty decisions that eat up resources in exchange for a paltry or highly indeterminate return. Note the above is largely relevant to resource-constrained businesses, which is most orgs other than maybe FAANG and similar.