When the numbers are large enough, the details don't matter much. Maybe he is really only a 250x engineer? A 100x engineer? It doesn't change the fact that without him no product would have been delivered.
I agree. I'm only arguing that there are times when engineers who enable "10x/100x" engineering don't get the visibility they deserve, sometimes until after they quit.
This hits close to home for me as I witnessed my partner being showered with praise for being "super productive" based on LoC alone, code which wasn't close to being production-ready. If you don't care about code quality, and want to be seen by management/people outside of your team as a 10x engineer with minimal effort: you can follow the same playbook.
When I was in school, the standard for engineer productivity was 10 lines of tested code per day, averaged. Maybe we do better today, with fewer footguns and faster compilers. But we expect more meaningful results from a line of code, too.
if you deliver the product only by taking shortcuts that impede other engineers you do not get credit for ‘delivering’ the product.
having been the next engineer to come along, this attitude drives me up a wall.