> The reward for work well done is the opportunity to
do more.
Let that sink in for a second. This can be a positive or a negative.
If you’re a 10x engineer, do you have to do 10x more work?
Let that sink in for a second. This can be a positive or a negative.
If you’re a 10x engineer, do you have to do 10x more work?
In reality, there is a distribution of talent among senior managers, and although they often do not seem to be the geniuses they are supposed to be, they are often better than the caricature that is made of them (except for my boss, who is pretty bad).
It follows that, in my experience and that of many others, the 10x engineer is not assigned a 10x higher job, but is more likely (we must always remember statistical distributions) to be assigned a job that has a greater impact for the organization or company.
The manager of a different team asks to borrow the same engineer for a week. The engineer’s managers obliges because he is a team player. However he does not adjust the schedule or reduce the engineers’ workload.
Junior engineers will place demands that said engineer mentors them. Again no additional time is allocated.
Meanwhile the high impact project literally affects the survival of the company. But hey the 10x engineer is a team player. He is the golden goose that deserves to beaten so the company extracts as many golden eggs as possible. Never mind if the golden goose dies. The company can always find another. /s
The top players are generally recognized as people to be supported, put on high-value projects, and kept happy. The comment says the opposite happens, which is that the top engineers are not put in a position from which they can do the best work, but in one from which their productivity declines, the high-impact project is not done or deployed, until eventually the top engineer leaves the company, for, presumably--since why one company should be different from another?--another company where they will find the same frustratingly poor use of their talents.
One of the problems I see is that many people see themselves as high-level engineers (or athletes, or professionals), but are not seen as such by others. In some cases, others are "dumb"--we have all been there--but in other instances management, which is not made up of all "dumb" professionals, may not see the talent that the alleged top engineers think they possess.