Having worked with someone I'd consider a 10x engineer who did not create much technical debt, I think the defining characteristic of the group is the ability t

Having worked with someone I'd consider a 10x engineer who did not create much technical debt, I think the defining characteristic of the group is the ability to choose good abstractions. This of course means that they are better able to shine in different contexts (he was not 10x faster at creating webforms in React, for example). A story I heard from him recently came from a consultation with a team at unicorn that had spent months modeling a particular problem using a set of graph algorithms. For the past 3 months they'd failed to get the performance they wanted despite a great deal of effort. They brought him in and explained the situation, he realized quickly that the results they needed could be achieved with a simulated annealing style job. Three days after walking in the door he successfully implemented a solution to a problem that had stumped the entire team, in their area of expertise, for 3 months. His career is littered with such anecdotes. Definitely a 10x engineer IMO.