What you are describing sounds like a good senior engineer. There can ofcourse be exceptions, especially if we talk about necessary complexity that has been tur

What you are describing sounds like a good senior engineer. There can ofcourse be exceptions, especially if we talk about necessary complexity that has been turned into a swamp, but usually what you are describing is closer to x2 engineering. x10 is when you stop solving problems and make them vanish instead. An example: Business/product/whatever wants fuzzy search on a listing. x2 says "I know how to do that. We just use Debezium and kafka to get the data into Elastic Search and then query it from there". Business/product/whatever says "cool, code it up". The infrastructure is a little difficult, but two months later a well tested good solution is in production, everyone is happy. Good job? x10 says "how good does the fuzzy search need to be? Elastic Search is king, but Postgres can do it too". Business/product/whatever says "I don't know". x10 engineer codes a demo in 2 hours, shows it to business/product/whatever. Business/product/whatever says "that will do, lets ship it". The day after its shipped to production, noone ever talks about fuzzy search anymore. Noone is every consistently x2 or x10 or xWhatever. Sometimes x2 is the best you can do, but other times you can do much much better. The trick is usually to be on the lookout for it.