That's a pretty good summary. In reality, though, what happens is that engineers with no experience first get an education. For example, in RF - getting your

That's a pretty good summary. In reality, though, what happens is that engineers with no experience first get an education. For example, in RF - getting your EE degree will quickly boost you up from a 1x to 5x engineer. Then, they go work for companies that do have experienced engineers, and they learn hundreds of skillsets, and develop deep domain knowledge in the ones that they are interested in, so my "engineer with little or no experience" in this space probably doesn't exist - a typical EE who came to work out of school for an RF company, probably learned a bunch of different concepts (PHY, MAC, Routing, DFM, RF Immunity, Antenna Design) from the 40x engineers already there with 10-20 years of relevant experience - and so, within a five years, would already be a 10x engineer in those field versus one that had no experience/education in them, and would be 20x in the projects that they had direct experience developing. I would suggest that 40x performance increase comes from a combination of innate skill (you are already extraordinarily gifted and capable), Direct domain experience, a leadership role in which you were required to develop/invent/create and then document/x-train/and educate others on the technologies that you have mastery on, and, perhaps most importantly - passion, energy, and devotion to the field. The caveat to all of this is that with projects of enough duration, everyone gets a chance to pick up experience, and knowledge, and so will increase their capability in a particular domain. The other caveat, is the vast amount of engineering is not simply repeating the same task over and over again - unless you are making cell phones for Samsung.