Cover image by Cbaile19, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

I know the fashionable take is that there's no such thing as a 10x engineer. And I'll agree that the idea from very early in the history of the software industry, the idea that one developer could literally do the coding work of ten of her colleagues, was probably never true and certainly isn't true now.

Can you code ten times better than someone else? Yes, a baby. You can code ten times better than a newborn baby. Congratulations.

But I do think there's such a thing as a 10x engineer because I believe there are people who make their team ten times better.

Be it through mentorship, documentation, or making sure everyone starts standups on time, I'm curious what you think makes a truly valuable team member.

So what does make a 10x engineer?