> Each developer should be replaceable. This attitude makes perfect sense from a managerial perspective. If workers are easily replaceable, they don't have neg

> Each developer should be replaceable. This attitude makes perfect sense from a managerial perspective. If workers are easily replaceable, they don't have negotiating leverage and you can pay them less, and you don't have to worry about risk to your company if one of them gets hit by a bus. Conversely, it is in an employee's interest to be hard to replace if they can be. It gives job security and negotiating leverage. A "good" 10x engineer, the ideal stereotype, would be hard to replace because by definition, you'd have to hire 10 people to replace them, and even then, the 10 might not be able to accomplish certain hard tasks. The bad stereotype of a 10x engineer is that they wrote a business-critical monstrosity only they can understand. What they both have in common is that they are hard to replace. That is why, I think, that when big companies hire well-known 10x engineers, they put them on non-business-critical research type roles. And smaller companies would presumably be wise to avoid them altogether.