The 10x engineer. Truly top 5 in his niche worldwide. Industry renowned.
And yet, some hormonal mid-level manager will still cancel their project and force them out. All to score brownie points with the squeaky wheels of less impressive, and slightly jealous pleb engineers endlessly complaining. Or their even more incompetent boss, who simply needs to squeeze the financials one more quarter, and needs a head on a spike.
Management assumes an engineer is an engineer, just hire another!
But, that is not the case.
Despite everything you are told to believe in the current year, great men do exist.
And when you fire or manage them out, your company often will not find another.
Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.
Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.
Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.
After the plug is pulled
While they may have joined when the company was smaller, more ambitious, more willing to give them a long leash to manifest incredible new technologies, now you use JIRA. Now you have tri-weekly status updates. Now you need to get something, anything, any demo out before earnings.
No one of the caliber of the departed will be excited to join now.
Like an endangered species, but critical and taken for granted.
The B players and below remain, but morale sinks. Lower and lower. No amount of manager pep talks or all hands can turn it around.
A players inspire by their presence. B players muddle along without a leader.
A players give the lower players the unrealistic hope that if they work hard enough, they might get there someday. One or two might actually do it.
But like the loss of beauty, of architecture, of fine art, life without the greats becomes dull, boring, sliding toward Dunder-Mifflin.
It is managements low IQ, middling taste, and totally inability to respect the art form, the aesthetic, the perfection of the right abstraction, that lets them callously decouple and drop out the engine from their flying plane, and then be surprised quarters later when engineering velocity continues to fall, good players keep leaving, and the spark of innovation is all but a smouldering and smoking pile of ash, no longer the roaring fire that made competitors jealous and produced products quickly that made customers happy.
Are you looking for 1:1 coaching (tech career, wifi-money, Canadian real estate)?
DM me on Substack or X with your topic, I’ll see if I can help. $100 for 30 mins.
– Fullstack
Memento Mori
But, I digress.
More than ever, managers are happy to take the risk. Let that blowhard go. He was past his prime anyways. It’s the “age of AI”, anyone can be a 10x engineer now, right?
Right??
Wrong. 10x engineering isn’t just the velocity, but the quality, the high bar, the encouraged path of everyone else to rise to their full potential.
APIs that are clear, abstractions cut and prudently demarcating the right boundaries and capabilities, communicating and persuading adoption across teams, without top down fiat being required to force them.
Seeing your mentors, greats you learned from and looked up to, managed out on cowardly procedural grounds after almost 15 years of loyal service and incredible output, is sobering.
“Who is John Galt?”
A modern memento mori: a reminder to meditate on your own coming death.
More and more, I meditate on my own coming end.
My wife now points out my gray hairs.
My 20s were long ago, and not so very long ago.
In your 30s, it’s time to put up, or shut up.
By your 40s, it’s a race against the clock. Every day, you’re living on borrowed time.
Tick tock, the executioner’s axe awaits over my head and yours.
Get your big tech juicy job offer. Land your promos. Build your wifi-money. And escape.
You don’t have much time. And neither do I.
Poaster is now in Beta. Future posts will cover case studies of how to build a SaaS like Poaster in a few weeks using AI, and how you can do the same. Only for paid subs.
