> The thing is a guy helping out via mentoring 10 other people or recruiting >better talent will create much more impact on how the company functions than if he

> The thing is a guy helping out via mentoring 10 other people or recruiting >better talent will create much more impact on how the company functions than if he wrote 2x better code or 2x faster. There is simply in almost all engineering effort a hard limit of how much a single person can contribute. Very debatable. Not at all true where I work ( worked ). Better code clearly larger impact on larger timeframes ( think 5+ year ) that perpetually retraining incoming juniors.