There are just different skills, and a balance of different individuals is often the most effective. There are definitely 10x (and even 100x) engineers, but th

There are just different skills, and a balance of different individuals is often the most effective. There are definitely 10x (and even 100x) engineers, but throw five 10x engineers together and you will get substantially less than 50x results. There's always mundane but time consuming shit that can best be handled by a 1x. And a bigger issue is that no company can hire a team of 10x engineers, because it's very expensive, 10x engineers are relatively rare, and dedicating more resources to the interview process gets diminishing returns in terms of identifying and hiring them. Not even companies with effectively infinitely deep pocketbooks manage to succeed at that. It's best to design systems optimized for the 1x case, focus a lot on avoiding the -1x candidates, and grab the exceptional candidates opportunistically when you get the chance, usually by working outside the process. Which seems to be what the industry has defaulted to.