For the first couple years of my career, I never met a 10x engineer and I didn't think they existed. There were people very experienced in the company's systems

For the first couple years of my career, I never met a 10x engineer and I didn't think they existed. There were people very experienced in the company's systems, who could move much more quickly than the rest of us, but a lot of us were pretty new so that wasn't too surprising. Later, at a FAANG company, I was working on a new full-stack system with a team of 4. It took us 2 months to plan and build out about half the functionality. Progress felt a bit slow, but no one was alarmed by how long it was taking and things were basically on track. Then my team hired a senior guy, internal transfer, with about 10 years of experience. He got up to speed on the project and did the other half of the work himself in about two weeks. The bottleneck was the rest of us reviewing his code (which was pristine; he was on the internal standards committee for the language we were using). I realized that sedate big-company speeds had become normalized for the rest of us, while this guy had never stopped asking himself if something could be done faster. If I'm worth my salary (debatable) this guy was worth 10x mine.